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THE  HUMAN  MACHINE 


BY    ARNOLD     BENNETT 


NOVELS 

THESE  TWAIN 

CLAYHANGER 

HILDA  LESSWAYS 

THE  OLD  WIVES'  TALE 

DENRY  THE  AUDACIOUS 

THE  OLD  ADAM 

HELEN  WITH  THE  HIGH  HAND 

THE  MATADOR  OF  THE  FIVE  TOWHS 

THE  BOOK  OF  CARLOTTA 

BURIED  ALIVE 

A  GREAT  MAN 

LEONORA 

WHOM  GOD  HATH  JOINED 

A  MAN  FROM  THE  NORTH 

ANNA  OF  THE  FIVE  TOWNS 

THE  GLIMPSE 

THE  CITY  OF  PLEASURE 

THE  GRAND  BABYLON  HOTEL 

HUGO 

THE  GATES  OF  WRATH 

POCKET  PHILOSOPHIES 

THE  AUTHOR'S  CRAFT 
MARRIED  LIFE 
FRIENDSHIP  AND  HAPPINESS 
HOW  TO  LIVE  ON  24  HOURS  A  DAV 
THE  HUMAN  MACHINE 
LITERARY  TASTE 
MENTAL  EFFICIENCY 

PLAYS 

THE  GREAT  ADVENTURE 
CUPID  AND  COMMONSENSK 
WHAT  THE  PUBLIC  WANTS 
POLITE  FARCES 
MILESTONES 
THE  HONEYMOON 

MISCELLANEOUS 
PARIS  NIGHTS 

THE  TRUTH  ABOUT  AN  AUTHOR  1 
LIBERTY! 
OVER  THERE:  WAR  SCENES 

GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 
NEW  YORK 


THE  HUMAN  MACHINE 


BY 

ARNOLD  BENNETT 

Author  of  "  How  to  Live  on  24  Hours  a  Day" 

•«Thc  Old  Wives'  Tale,"  etc. 


GEORGE  H.  DORAN    COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS  ^\         NEW  YORK 


Author's  Edition 


CONTENTS 

I.  Taking  Oneself  for  Granted    .     .     . 

II.  Amateurs  in  the  Art  of  Living    .     . 

III.  The  Brain  as  a  Gentleman-at-Large 

IV.  The  First  Practical  Step 29 

V.  Habit-Forming  by  Concentration    .     .  36 

VI.     Lord  over  the  Noddle 44 

VII.  What  "Living"  chiefly  is     ....  51 

VIII.     The  Daily  Friction 58 

IX.     "Fire!" 65 

X.  Mischievously  Overworking  it    ...  72 

XI.     An  Interlude 79 

XII.    An  Interest  in  Life 87 

XIII.  Success  and  Failure 94 

XIV.  A  Man  and  His  Environment      .     .     .  101 
XV.     L.  S.  D. log 

XVI.     Reason,  Reason ! 117 


TAKING  ONESELF  FOR 
GRANTED 

THERE  are  men  who  are  capable  of  lov- 
ing a  machine  more  deeply  than  they 
can  love  a  woman.  They  are  among 
the  happiest  men  on  earth.  This  is  not  a  sneer 
meanly  shot  from  cover  at  women.  It  is  simply 
a  statement  of  notorious  fact.  Men  who  worry 
themselves  to  distraction  over  the  perfecting  of 
a  machine  are  indubitably  blessed  beyond  their 
kind.  Most  of  us  have  known  such  men.  Yes- 
terday they  were  constructing  motor-cars.  But 
to-day  aeroplanes  are  in  the  air  —  or,  at  any 
rate,  they  ought  to  be,  according  to  the  in- 
ventors. Watch  the  inventors.  Invention  is  not 
usually  their  principal  business.  They  must 
invent  in  their  spare  time.  They  must  invent 
before  breakfast,  invent  in  the  Strand  between 
Lyons's  and  the  office,  invent  after  dinner,  in- 
vent on  Sundays.  See  with  what  ardour  they 
rush  home  of  a  night!  See  how  they  seize  a 


8  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

half -holiday,  like  hungry  dogs  a  bone!  They 
don't  want  golf,  bridge,  limericks,  novels,  illus- 
trated magazines,  clubs,  whisky,  starting-prices, 
hints  about  neckties,  political  meetings,  yarns, 
comic  songs,  anturic  salts,  nor  the  smiles  that 
are  situate  between  a  gay  corsage  and  a  picture 
hat.  They  never  wonder,  at  a  loss,  what  they 
will  do  next.  Their  evenings  never  drag  —  are 
always  too  short.  You  may,  indeed,  catch  them 
at  twelve  o'clock  at  night  on  the  flat  of  their 
backs ;  but  not  in  bed !  No,  in  a  shed,  under  the 
machine,  holding  a  candle  (whose  paths  drop 
fatness)  up  to  the  connecting-rod  that  is  strained, 
or  the  wheel  that  is  out  of  centre.  They  are  con- 
tinually interested,  nay,  enthralled.  They  have 
a  machine,  and  they  are  perfecting  it.  They  get 
one  part  right,  and  then  another  goes  wrong; 
and  they  get  that  right,  and  then  another  goes 
wrong,  and  so  on.  When  they  are  quite  sure 
they  have  reached  perfection,  forth  issues  the 
machine  out  of  the  shed  —  and  in  five  minutes 
is  smashed  up,  together  with  a  limb  or  so  of  the 
inventors,  just  because  they  had  been  quite  sure 
too  soon.  Then  the  whole  business  starts  again. 
They  do  not  give  up  —  that  particular  wreck 
was,  of  course,  due  to  a  mere  oversight;  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  9 

whole  business  starts  again.  For  they  have 
glimpsed  perfection;  they  have  the  gleam  of 
perfection  in  their  souls.  Thus  their  lives  run 
away.  "  They  will  never  fly !  "  you  remark,  cyni- 
cally. Well,  if  they  don't?  Besides,  what  about 
Wright?  With  all  your  cynicism,  have  you  never 
envied  them  their  machine  and  their  passionate 
interest  in  it? 

You  know,  perhaps,  the  moment  when,  brush- 
ing in  front  of  the  glass,  you  detected  your  first 
grey  hair.  You  stopped  brushing;  then  you  re- 
sumed brushing,  hastily;  you  pretended  not  to 
be  shocked,  but  you  were.  Perhaps  you  know 
a  more  disturbing  moment  than  that,  the  mo- 
ment when  it  suddenly  occurred  to  you  that  you 
had  "arrived"  as  far  as  you  ever  will  arrive; 
and  you 'had  realised  as  much  of  your  early 
dream  as  you  ever  will  realise,  and  the  realisation 
was  utterly  unlike  the  dream ;  and  marriage  was 
excessively  prosaic  and  eternal,  not  at  all  what 
you  expected  it  to  be;  and  your  illusions  were 
dissipated;  and  games  and  hobbies  had  an  un- 
pleasant core  of  tedium  and  futility;  and  the 
ideal  tobacco-mixture  did  not  exist;  and  one 
literary  masterpiece  resembled  another;  and  all 
the  days  that  are  to  come  will  more  or  less  re- 


io    .         THE    HUMAN   MACHINE 

semble  the  present  day,  until  you  die ;  and  in  an 
illuminating  flash  you  understood  what  all  those 
people  were  driving  at  when  they  wrote  such 
unconscionably  long  letters  to  the  Telegraph  as 
to  life  being  worth  living  or  not  worth  living; 
and  there  was  naught  to  be  done  but  face  the 
grey,  monotonous  future,  and  pretend  to  be 
cheerful  with  the  worm  of  ennai  gnawing  at 
your  heart!  In  a  word,  the  moment  when  it 
occurred  to  you  that  yours  is  "  the  common  lot." 
In  that  moment  have  you  not  wished  —  do  you 
not  continually  wish  —  for  an  exhaustless  ma- 
chine, a  machine  that  you  could  never  get  to  the 
end  of?  Would  you  not  give  your  head  to  be 
lying  on  the  flat  of  your  back,  peering  with  a 
candle,  dirty,  foiled,  catching  cold  —  but  ab- 
sorbed in  the  pursuit  of  an  object?  Have  you 
not  gloomily  regretted  that  you  were  born  with- 
out a  mechanical  turn,  because  there  is  really 
something  about  a  machine  .  .  .  ? 

It  has  never  struck  you  that  you  do  possess  a 
machine!  Oh,  blind!  Oh,  dull!  It  has  never 
struck  you  that  you  have  at  hand  a  machine  won- 
derful beyond  all  mechanisms  in  sheds,  intricate, 
delicately  adjustable,  of  astounding  and  miracu- 
lous possibilities,  interminably  interesting !  That 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  n 

machine  is  yourself.  **  This  fellow  is  preaching. 
I  won't  have  it !  "  you  exclaim  resentfully.  Dear 
sir,  I  am  not  preaching,  and,  even  if  I  were,  I 
think  you  would  have  it.  I  think  I  can  anyhow 
keep  hold  of  your  button  for  a  while,  though  you 
pull  hard.  I  am  not  preaching.  I  am  simply  bent 
on  calling  your  attention  to  a  fact  which  has 
perhaps  wholly  or  partially  escaped  you  — 
namely,  that  you  are  the  most  fascinating  bit  of 
machinery  that  ever  was.  You  do  yourself  less 
than  justice.  It  is  said  that  men  are  only  inter- 
ested in  themselves.  The  truth  is  that,  as  a  rule, 
men  are  interested  in  every  mortal  thing  except 
themselves.  They  have  a  habit  of  taking  them- 
selves for  granted,  and  that  habit  is  responsible 
for  nine-tenths  of  the  boredom  and  despair  on 
the  face  of  the  planet. 

A  man  will  wake  up  in  the  middle  of  the  night 
(usually  owing  to  some  form  of  delightful  ex- 
cess), and  his  brain  will  be  very  active  indeed 
for  a  space  ere  he  can  go  to  sleep  again.  In  that 
candid  hour,  after  the  exaltation  of  the  evening 
and  before  the  hope  of  the  dawn,  he  will  see 
everything  in  its  true  colours  —  except  himself. 
There  is  nothing  like  a  sleepless  couch  for  a  clear 
vision  of  one's  environment.  He  will  see  all  his 


ia  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

wife's  faults  and  the  hopelessness  of  trying  to 
cure  them.  He  will  momentarily  see,  though 
with  less  sharpness  of  outline,  his  own  faults. 
He  will  probably  decide  that  the  anxieties  of 
children  outweigh  the  joys  connected  with  chil- 
dren. He  will  admit  all  the  shortcomings  of 
existence,  will  face  them  like  a  man,  grimly, 
sourly,  in  a  sturdy  despair.  He  will  mutter :  "  Of 
course  I'm  angry!  Who  wouldn't  be?  Of 
course  I  'm  disappointed !  Did  I  expect  this 
twenty  years  ago?  Yes,  we  ought  to  save  more. 
But  we  don't,  so  there  you  are !  I  'm  bound  to 
worry !  I  know  I  should  be  better  if  I  did  n't 
smoke  so  much.  I  know  there  's  absolutely  no 
sense  at  all  in  taking  liqueurs.  Absurd  to  be 
ruffled  with  her  when  she 's  in  one  of  her  moods. 
I  don't  have  enough  exercise.  Can't  be  regular, 
somehow.  Not  the  slightest  use  hoping  that 
things  will  be  different,  because  I  know  they 
won't.  Queer  world!  Never  really  what  you 
may  call  happy,  you  know.  Now,  if  things  were 
different  .  .  ."  He  loses  consciousness. 

Observe:  he  has  taken  himself  for  granted, 
just  glancing  at  his  faults  and  looking  away  again. 
It  is  his  environment  that  has  occupied  his  atten- 
tion, and  his  environment  —  "  things  "  —  that  he 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  13 

would  wish  to  have  "  different,"  did  he  not  know, 
out  of  the  fulness  of  experience,  that  it  is  futile 
to  desire  such  a  change?  What  he  wants  is  a 
pipe  that  won't  put  itself  into  his  mouth,  a  glass 
that  won't  leap  of  its  own  accord  to  his  lips, 
money  that  won't  slip  untouched  out  of  his 
pocket,  legs  that  without  asking  will  carry  him 
certain  miles  every  day  in  the  open  air,  habits 
that  practise  themselves,  a  wife  that  will  expand 
and  contract  according  to  his  humours,  like  a 
Wernicke  bookcase,  always  complete  but  never 
finished.  Wise  man,  he  perceives  at  once  that 
he  can't  have  these  things.  And  so  he  resigns 
himself  to  the  universe,  and  settles  down  to  a 
permanent,  restrained  discontent.  No  one  shall 
say  he  is  unreasonable. 

You  see,  he  has  given  no  attention  to  the  ma- 
chine. Let  us  not  call  it  a  flying-machine.  Let 
us  call  it  simply  an  automobile.  There  it  is  on 
the  road,  jolting,  screeching,  ratttling,  perfum- 
ing. And  there  he  is,  saying :  "  This  road  ought 
to  be  as  smooth  as  velvet.  That  hill  in  front  is 
ridiculous,  and  the  descent  on  the  other  side 
positively  dangerous.  And  it's  all  turns  —  I 
can't  see  a  hundred  yards  in  front."  He  has  a 
wild  idea  of  trying  to  force  the  County  Council 


14  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

to  sand-paper  the  road,  or  of  employing  the  new 
Territorial  Army  to  remove  the  hill.  But  he  dis- 
misses that  idea  —  he  is  so  reasonable.  He  ac- 
cepts all.  He  sits  clothed  in  reasonableness  on 
the  machine,  and  accepts  all.  "  Ass !  "  you  ex- 
claim. "  Why  does  n't  he  get  down  and  inflate 
that  tyre,  for  one  thing?  Anyone  can  see  the 
sparkling  apparatus  is  wrong,  and  it's  perfectly 
certain  the  gear-box  wants  oil.  Why  doesn't 

he ?  "    I  will  tell  you  why  he  does  n't.    Just 

because  he  is  n't  aware  that  he  is  on  a  machine 
at  all.  He  has  never  examined  what  he  is  on. 
And  at  the  back  of  his  consciousness  is  a  dim  idea 
that  he  is  perched  on  a  piece  of  solid,  immutable 
rock  that  runs  on  castors. 


II 

AMATEURS   IN  THE  ART  OF 
LIVING 

CONSIDERING  that  we  have  to  spend 
the  whole  of  our  lives  in  this  human 
machine,  considering  that  it  is  our  sole 
means  of  contact  and  compromise  with  the  rest 
of  the  world,  we  really  do  devote  to  it  very  little 
attention.  When  I  say  "  we,"  I  mean  our  inmost 
spirits,  the  instinctive  part,  the  mystery  within 
that  exists.  And  when  I  say  "the  human  ma- 
chine "  I  mean  the  brain  and  the  body  —  and 
chiefly  the  brain.  The  expression  of  the  soul  by 
means  of  the  brain  and  body  is  what  we  call  the 
art  of  "living."  We  certainly  do  not  learn  this 
art  at  school  to  any  appreciable  extent.  At  school 
we  are  taught  that  it  is  necessary  to  fling  our 
arms  and  legs  to  and  fro  for  so  many  hours  per 
diem.  We  are  also  shown,  practically,  that  our 
brains  are  capable  of  performing  certain  useful 
tricks,  and  that  if  we  do  not  compel  our  brains 


16  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

to  perform  those  tricks  we  shall  suffer.  Thus 
one  day  we  run  home  and  proclaim  to  our  de- 
lighted parents  that  eleven  twelves  are  132.  A 
feat  of  the  brain!  So  it  goes  on  until  our  parents 
begin  to  look  up  to  us  because  we  can  chatter 
of  cosines  or  sketch  the  foreign  policy  of  Louis 
XIV.  Good!  But  not  a  word  about  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  art  of  living  yet!  Only  a  few  de- 
tached rules  from  our  parents,  to  be  blindly  fol- 
lowed when  particular  crises  supervene.  And, 
indeed,  it  would  be  absurd  to  talk  to  a  school- 
boy about  the  expression  of  his  soul.  He  would 
probably  mutter  a  monosyllable  which  is  not 
"  mice." 

Of  course,  school  is  merely  a  preparation  for 
living;  unless  one  goes  to  a  university,  in  which 
case  it  is  a  preparation  for  university.  One  is 
supposed  to  turn  one's  attention  to  living  when 
these  preliminaries  are  over  —  say  at  the  age  of 
about  twenty.  Assuredly  one  lives  then;  there 
is,  however,  nothing  new  in  that,  for  one  has 
been  living  all  the  time,  in  a  fashion;  all  the 
time  one  has  been  using  the  machine  without 
understanding  it.  But  does  one,  school  and  col- 
lege being  over,  enter  upon  a  study  of  the  ma- 
chine? Not  a  bit.  The  question  then  becomes, 


THE   HUMAN   MACHINE  17 

not  how  to  live,  but  how  to  obtain  and  retain  a 
position  in  which  one  will  be  able  to  live;  how 
to  get  minute  portions  of  dead  animals  and  plants 
which  one  can  swallow,  in  order  not  to  die  of 
hunger;  how  to  acquire  and  constantly  renew  a 
stock  of  other  portions  of  dead  animals  and  plants 
in  which  one  can  envelop  oneself  in  order  not  to 
die  of  cold;  how  to  procure  the  exclusive  right 
of  entry  into  certain  huts  where  one  may  sleep 
and  eat  without  being  rained  upon  by  the  clouds 
of  heaven.  And  so  forth.  And  when  one  has 
realised  this  ambition,  there  comes  the  desire  to 
be  able  to  double  the  operation  and  do  it,  not  for 
oneself  alone,  but  for  oneself  and  another.  Mar- 
riage! But  no  scientific  sustained  attention  is 
yet  given  to  the  real  business  of  living,  of  smooth 
intercourse,  of  self-expression,  of  conscious  adap- 
tation to  environment  —  in  brief,  to  the  study 
of  the  machine.  At  thirty  the  chances  are  that 
a  man  will  understand  better  the  draught  of  a 
chimney  than  his  own  respiratory  apparatus  — 
to  name  one  of  the  simple,  obvious  things  —  and 
as  for  understanding  the  working  of  his  own 
brain  —  what  an  idea!  As  for  the  skill  to  avoid 
the  waste  of  power  involved  by  friction  in  the 
business  of  living,  do  we  give  an  hour  to  it  in 


i8  THE    HUMAN   MACHINE 

a  month?  Do  we  ever  at  all  examine  it  save  in 
an  amateurish  and  clumsy  fashion?  A  young 
lady  produces  a  water-colour  drawing.  "  Very 
nice !  "  we  say,  and  add,  to  ourselves,  "  For  an 
amateur."  But  our  living  is  more  amateurish 
than  that  young  lady's  drawing;  though  surely 
we  ought  everyone  of  us  to  be  professionals  at 
living ! 

When  we  have  been  engaged  in  the  prelimi- 
naries to  living  for  about  fifty-five  years,  we 
begin  to  think  about  slacking  off.  Up  till  this 
period  our  reason  for  not  having  scientifically 
studied  the  art  of  living  —  the  perfecting  and  use 
of  the  finer  parts  of  the  machine  —  is  not  that 
we  have  lacked  leisure  (most  of  us  have  enor- 
mous heaps  of  leisure),  but  that  we  have  simply 
been  too  absorbed  in  the  preliminaries,  have,  in 
fact,  treated  the  preliminaries  to  the  business  as 
the  business  itself.  Then  at  fifty-five  we  ought 
at  last  to  begin  to  live  our  lives  with  professional 
skill,  as  a  professional  painter  paints  pictures. 
Yes,  but  we  can't.  It  is  too  late  then.  Neither 
painters,  nor  acrobats,  nor  any  professionals  can 
be  formed  at  the  age  of  fifty-five.  Thus  we  finish 
our  lives  amateurishly,  as  we  have  begun  them. 
And  when  the  machine  creaks  and  sets  our  teeth 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  19 

on  edge,  or  refuses  to  obey  the  steering-wheel 
and  deposits  us  in  the  ditch,  we  say :  "  Can't  be 
helped!  "  or  "  Does  n't  matter!  It  will  be  all  the 
same  a  hundred  years  hence !  "  or :  "I  must  make 
the  best  of  things."  And  we  try  to  believe  that 
in  accepting  the  status  quo  we  have  justified 
the  status  quo,  and  all  the  time  we  feel  our 
insincerity. 

You  exclaim  that  I  exaggerate.  I  do.  To 
force  into  prominence  an  aspect  of  affairs  usually 
overlooked,  it  is  absolutely  necessary  to  exag- 
gerate. Poetic  license  is  one  name  for  this  kind 
of  exaggeration.  But  I  exaggerate  very  little 
indeed,  much  less  than  perhaps  you  think.  I 
know  that  you  are  going  to  point  out  to  me  that 
vast  numbers  of  people  regularly  spend  a  con- 
siderable portion  of  their  leisure  in  striving  after 
self-improvement.  Granted!  And  I  am  glad  of 
it.  But  I  should  be  gladder  if  their  strivings 
bore  more  closely  upon  the  daily  business  of 
living,  of  self-expression  without  friction  and 
without  futile  desires.  See  this  man  who  regu- 
larly studies  every  evening  of  his  life!  He  has 
genuinely  understood  the  nature  of  poetry,  and 
his  taste  is  admirable.  He  recites  verse  with 
true  feeling,  and  may  be  said  to  be  highly  culti- 


ao  THE   HUMAN   MACHINE 

vated.  Poetry  is  a  continual  source  of  pleasure 
to  him.  True !  But  why  is  he  always  complain- 
ing about  not  receiving  his  deserts  in  the  office? 
Why  is  he  worried  about  finance?  Why  does  he 
so  often  sulk  with  his  wife?  Why  does  he  per- 
sist in  eating  more  than  his  digestion  will  toler- 
ate? It  was  not  written  in  the  book  of  fate  that 
he  should  complain  and  worry  and  sulk  and 
suffer.  And  if  he  was  a  professional  at  living  he 
would  not  do  these  things.  There  is  no  reason 
why  he  should  do  them,  except  the  reason  that 
he  has  never  learnt  his  business,  never  studied 
the  human  machine  as  a  whole,  never  really 
thought  rationally  about  living.  Supposing  you 
encountered  an  automobilist  who  was  swerving 
and  grinding  all  over  the  road,  and  you  stopped 
to  ask  what  was  the  matter,  and  he  replied: 
"  Never  mind  what 's  the  matter.  Just  look  at 
my  lovely  acetylene  lamps,  how  they  shine,  and 
how  I  Ve  polished  them !  "  You  would  not  re- 
gard him  as  a  Clifford-Earp,  or  even  as  an  en- 
tirely sane  man.  So  with  our  student  of  poetry. 
It  is  indubitable  that  a  large  amount  of  what  is 
known  as  self-improvement  is  simply  self-indul- 
gence—  a  form  of  pleasure  which  only  inciden- 
tally improves  a  particular  part  of  the  machine, 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  21 

and  even  that  to  the  neglect  of  far  more  impor- 
tant parts. 

My  aim  is  to  direct  a  man's  attention  to  himself 
as  a  whole,  considered  as  a  machine,  complex 
and  capable  of  quite  extraordinary  efficiency,  for 
travelling  through  this  world  smoothly,  in  any 
desired  manner,  with  satisfaction  not  only  to 
himself  but  to  the  people  he  meets  en  route,  and 
the  people  who  are  overtaking  him  and  whom 
he  is  overtaking.  My  aim  is  to  show  that  only 
an  inappreciable  fraction  of  our  ordered  and  sus- 
tained efforts  is  given  to  the  business  of  actual 
living,  as  distinguished  from  the  preliminaries 
to  living. 


Ill 

THE   BRAIN  AS   A  GENTLE- 
MAN-AT-LARGE 

IT  is  not  as  if,  in  this  business  of  daily  living, 
we  were  seriously  hampered  by  ignorance 
either  as  to  the  results  which  we  ought  to 
obtain,  or  as  to  the  general  means  which  we  must 
employ  in  order  to  obtain  them.  With  all  our 
absorption  in  the  mere  preliminaries  to  living, 
and  all  our  carelessness  about  living  itself,  we 
arrive  pretty  soon  at  a  fairly  accurate  notion  of 
what  satisfactory  living  is,  and  we  perceive  with 
some  clearness  the  methods  necessary  to  success. 
I  have  pictured  the  man  who  wakes  up  in  the 
middle  of  the  night  and  sees  the  horrid  semi- 
fiasco  of  his  life.  But  let  me  picture  the  man 
who  wakes  up  refreshed  early  on  a  fine  summer 
morning  and  looks  into  his  mind  with  the  eyes 
of  hope  and  experience,  not  experience  and  de- 
spair. That  man  will  pass  a  delightful  half-hour 
in  thinking  upon  the  scheme  of  the  universe  as 
it  affects  himself.  He  is  quite  clear  that  content- 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  23 

ment  depends  on  his  own  acts,  and  that  no  power 
can  prevent  him  from  performing  those  acts. 
He  plans  everything  out,  and  before  he  gets  up 
he  knows  precisely  what  he  must  and  will  do  in 
certain  foreseen  crises  and  junctures.  He  sin- 
cerely desires  to  live  efficiently  —  who  would 
wish  to  make  a  daily  mess  of  existence?  —  and 
he  knows  the  way  to  realise  the  desire. 

And  yet,  mark  me!  That  man  will  not  have 
been  an  hour  on  his  feet  on  this  difficult  earth 
before  the  machine  has  unmistakably  gone 
wrong:  the  machine  which  was  designed  to  do 
this  work  of  living,  which  is  capable  of  doing  it 
thoroughly  well,  but  which  has  not  been  put  into 
order!  What  is  the  use  of  consulting  the  map 
of  life  and  tracing  the  itinerary,  and  getting  the 
machine  out  of  the  shed,  and  making  a  start,  if 
half  the  nuts  are  loose,  or  the  steering  pillar  is 
twisted,  or  there  is  no  petrol  in  the  tank?  (Hav- 
ing asked  this  question,  I  will  drop  the  me- 
chanico-vehicular  comparison,  which  is  too  rough 
and  crude  for  the  delicacy  of  the  subject.) 
Where  has  the  human  machine  gone  wrong? 
It  has  gone  wrong  in  the  brain.  What,  is  he 
"wrong  in  the  head"?  Most  assuredly,  most 
strictly.  He  knows  —  none  better  —  that  when 


24  THE    HUMAN   MACHINE 

his  wife  employs  a  particular  tone  containing 
ten  grains  of  asperity,  and  he  replies  in  a  par- 
ticular tone  containing  eleven  grains,  the  conse- 
quences will  be  explosive.  He  knows,  on  the 
other  hand,  that  if  he  replies  in  a  tone  contain- 
ing only  one  little  drop  of  honey  the  consequences 
may  not  be  unworthy  of  two  reasonable  beings. 
He  knows  this.  His  brain  is  fully  instructed. 
And  lo!  his  brain,  while  arguing  that  women 
are  really  too  absurd  (as  if  that  was  the  point), 
is  sending  down  orders  to  the  muscles  of  the 
throat  and  mouth  which  result  in  at  least  eleven 
grains  of  asperity,  and  conjugal  relations  are 
endangered  for  the  day.  He  didn't  want  to  do 
it.  His  desire  was  not  to  do  it.  He  despises 
himself  for  doing  it.  But  his  brain  was  not  in 
working  order.  His  brain  ran  away  —  "  raced  " 
—  on  its  own  account,  against  reason,  against 
desire,  against  morning  resolves  —  and  there 
he  is! 

That  is  just  one  example,  of  the  simplest  and 
slightest.  Examples  can  be  multiplied.  The  man 
may  be  a  young  man  whose  immediate  future 
depends  on  his  passing  an  examination  —  an 
examination  which  he  is  capable  of  passing  "  on 
his  head,"  which  nothing  can  prevent  him  from 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  25 

passing  if  only  his  brain  will  not  be  so  absurd 
as  to  give  orders  to  his  legs  to  walk  out  of  the 
house  towards  the  tennis  court  instead  of  send- 
ing them  upstairs  to  the  study;  if  only,  having 
once  safely  lodged  him  in  the  study,  his  brain 
will  devote  itself  to  the  pages  of  books  instead 
of  dwelling  on  the  image  of  a  nice  girl  —  not 
at  all  like  other  girls.  Or  the  man  may  be  an  old 
man  who  will  live  in  perfect  comfort  if  only  his 
brain  will  not  interminably  run  round  and  round 
in  a  circle  of  grievances,  apprehensions,  and  fears 
which  no  amount  of  contemplation  can  destroy 
or  even  ameliorate. 

The  brain,  the  brain  —  that  is  the  seat  of 
trouble !  "  Well,"  you  say,  "  of  course  it  is.  We 
all  know  that !  "  We  don't  act  as  if  we  did,  any- 
way. "  Give  us  more  brains,  Lord !  "  ejaculated 
a  great  writer.  Personally,  I  think  he  would 
have  been  wiser  if  he  had  asked  first  for  the 
power  to  keep  in  order  such  brains  as  we  have. 
We  indubitably  possess  quite  enough  brains, 
quite  as  much  as  we  can  handle.  The  supreme 
muddlers  of  living  are  often  people  of  quite 
remarkable  intellectual  faculty,  with  a  quite 
remarkable  gift  of  being  wise  for  others.  The 
pity  is  that  our  brains  have  a  way  of  "  wander- 


26  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

ing,"  as  it  is  politely  called.  Brain-wandering  is 
indeed  now  recognised  as  a  specific  disease.  I 
wonder  what  you,  O  business  man  with  an  office 
in  Ludgate  Circus,  would  say  to  your  office-boy, 
whom  you  had  dispatched  on  an  urgent  message 
to  Westminster,  and  whom  you  found  larking 
around  Euston  Station  when  you  rushed  to  catch 
your  week-end  train.  "  Please,  sir,  I  started  to 
go  to  Westminster,  but  there  's  something  funny 
in  my  limbs  that  makes  me  go  up  all  manner  of 
streets.  I  can't  help  it,  sir!  "  "  Can't  you?  "  you 
would  say.  "  Well,  you  had  better  go  and  be 
somebody  else's  office-boy."  Your  brain  is 
something  worse  than  that  office-boy,  something 
more  insidiously  potent  for  evil. 

I  conceive  the  brain  of  the  average  well- 
intentioned  man  as  possessing  the  tricks  and 
manners  of  one  of  those  gentlemen-at-large  who, 
having  nothing  very  urgent  to  do,  stroll  along 
and  offer  their  services  gratis  to  some  short- 
handed  work  of  philanthropy.  They  will  com- 
monly demoralise  and  disorganise  the  business 
conduct  of  an  affair  in  about  a  fortnight.  They 
come  when  they  like;  they  go  when  they  like. 
Sometimes  they  are  exceedingly  industrious  and 
obedient,  but  then  there  is  an  even  Chance  that 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  27 

they  will  shirk  and  follow  their  own  sweet  will. 
And  they  mustn't  be  spoken  to,  or  pulled  up  — 
for  have  they  not  kindly  volunteered,  and  are 
they  not  giving  their  days  for  naught?  These 
persons  are  the  bane  of  the  enterprises  in  which 
they  condescend  to  meddle.  Now,  there  is  a  vast 
deal  too  much  of  the  gentleman-at-large  about 
one's  brain.  One's  brain  has  no  right  whatever 
to  behave  as  a  gentleman-at-large;  but  it  in  fact 
does.  It  forgets;  it  flatly  ignores  orders;  at  the 
critical  moment,  when  pressure  is  highest,  it 
simply  lights  a  cigarette  and  goes  out  for  a  walk. 
And  we  meekly  sit  down  under  this  behaviour! 
"  I  did  n't  feel  like  stewing,"  says  the  young  man 
who,  against  his  wish,  will  fail  in  his  examina- 
tion. "  The  words  were  out  of  my  mouth  before 
I  knew  it,"  says  the  husband  whose  wife  is  a 
woman.  "  I  could  n't  get  any  inspiration  to-day," 
says  the  artist.  "  I  can't  resist  Stilton,"  says  the 
fellow  who  is  dying  of  greed.  "  One  can't  help 
one's  thoughts,"  says  the  old  worrier.  And  this 
last  really  voices  the  secret  excuse  of  all  five. 

And  you  all  say  to  me :  "  My  brain  is  myself. 
How  can  I  alter  myself?  I  was  born  like  that." 
In  the  first  place  you  were  not  born  "  like  that," 
you  have  lapsed  to  that.  And  in  the  second 


28  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

place  your  brain  is  not  yourself.  It  is  only  a 
part  of  yourself,  and  not  the  highest  seat  of 
authority.  Do  you  love  your  mother,  wife,  or 
children  with  your  brain?  Do  you  desire  with 
your  brain?  Do  you,  in  a  word,  ultimately  and 
essentially  Rite  with  your  brain?  No.  Your 
brain  is  an  instrument.  The  proof  that  it  is  an 
instrument  lies  in  the  fact  that,  when  extreme 
necessity  urges,  you  can  command  your  brain  to 
do  certain  things,  and  it  does  them.  The  first 
of  the  two  great  principles  which  underlie  the 
efficiency  of  the  human  machine  is  this:  The 
brain  is  a  servant,  exterior  to  the  central  force  of 
the  Ego.  If  it  is  out  of  control  the  reason  is  not 
that  it  is  uncontrollable,  but  merely  that  its  dis- 
cipline has  been  neglected.  The  brain  can  be 
trained,  as  the  hand  and  eye  can  be  trained;  it 
can  be  made  as  obedient  as  a  sporting  dog,  and 
by  similar  methods.  In  the  meantime  the  indis- 
pensable preparation  for  brain-discipline  is  to 
form  the  habit  of  regarding  one's  brain  as  an 
instrument  exterior  to  one's  self,  like  a  tongue 
or  a  foot. 


THE  brain  is  a  highly  quaint  organism. 
Let  me  say  at  once,  lest  I  should  be 
cannonaded  by  physiologists,  psycholo- 
gists, or  metaphysicians,  by  that  the  "  brain " 
I  mean  the  faculty  which  reasons  and  which 
gives  orders  to  the  muscles.  I  mean  exactly 
what  the  plain  man  means  by  the  brain.  The 
brain  is  the  diplomatist  which  arranges  relations 
between  our  instinctive  self  and  the  universe, 
and  it  fulfils  its  mission  when  it  provides  for  the 
maximum  of  freedom  to  the  instincts  with  the 
minimum  of  friction.  It  argues  with  the  in- 
stincts. It  takes  them  on  one  side  and  points 
out  the  unwisdom  of  certain  performances.  It 
catches  them  by  the  coat-tails  when  they  are 
about  to  make  fools  of  themselves.  "  Don't  drink 
all  that  iced  champagne  at  a  draught,"  it  says 
to  one  instinct ;  "  we  may  die  of  it."  "  Don't 
catch  that  rude  fellow  one  in  the  eye,"  it  says 
to  another  instinct;  "he  is  more  powerful  than 


30  THE   HUMAN   MACHINE 

us."  It  is,  in  fact,  a  majestic  spectacle  of  com- 
mon sense.  And  yet  it  has  the  most  extraordi- 
nary lapses.  It  is  just  like  that  man  —  we  all 
know  him  and  consult  him  —  who  is  a  continual 
fount  of  excellent,  sagacious  advice  on  every- 
thing, but  who  somehow  cannot  bring  his  sagac- 
ity to  bear  on  his  own  personal  career. 

In  the  matter  of  its  own  special  activities  the 
brain  is  usually  undisciplined  and  unreliable. 
We  never  know  what  it  will  do  next.  We  give  it 
some  work  to  do,  say,  as  we  are  walking  along 
the  street  to  the  office.  Perhaps  it  has  to  devise 
some  scheme  for  making  £150  suffice  for  £200, 
or  perhaps  it  has  to  plan  out  the  heads  of  a  very 
important  letter.  We  meet  a  pretty  woman,  and 
away  that  undisciplined,  sagacious  brain  runs 
after  her,  dropping  the  scheme  or  the  draft 
letter,  and  amusing  itself  with  aspirations  or 
regrets  for  half  an  hour,  an  hour,  sometimes  a 
day.  The  serious  part  of  our  instinctive  self 
feebly  remonstrates,  but  without  effect.  Or  it 
may  be  that  we  have  suffered  a  great  disap- 
pointment, which  is  definite  and  hopeless.  Will 
the  brain,  like  a  sensible  creature,  leave  that  dis- 
appointment alone,  and  instead  of  living  in  the 
past  live  in  the  present  or  the  future?  Not  it! 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  31 

Though  it  knows  perfectly  well  that  it  is  wasting 
its  +ime  and  casting  a  very  painful  and  utterly 
unnecessary  gloom  over  itself  and  us,  it  can  so 
little  control  its  unhealthy,  morbid  appetite  that 
no  expostulations  will  induce  it  to  behave  ration- 
ally. Or  perhaps,  after  a  confabulation  with  the 
soul,  it  has  been  decided  that  when  next  a  certain 
harmful  instinct  comes  into  play  the  brain  shall 
firmly  interfere.  "  Yes,"  says  the  brain,  "  I  really 
will  watch  that."  But  when  the  moment  arrives, 
is  the  brain  on  the  spot?  The  brain  has  prob- 
ably forgotten  the  affair  entirely,  or  remembered 
it  too  late;  or  sighs,  as  the  victorious  instinct 
knocks  it  on  the  head :  "  Well,  next  time !  " 

All  this,  and  much  more  that  every  reader  can 
supply  from  his  own  exciting  souvenirs,  is  absurd 
and  ridiculous  on  the  part  of  the  brain.  It  is 
a  conclusive  proof  that  the  brain  is  out  of  con- 
dition, idle  as  a  nigger,  capricious  as  an  actor- 
manager,  and  eaten  to  the  core  with  loose  habits. 
Therefore  the  brain  must  be  put  into  training. 
It  is  the  most  important  part  of  the  human 
machine  by  which  the  soul  expresses  and  de- 
velops itself,  and  it  must  learn  good  habits.  And 
primarily  it  must  be  taught  obedience.  Obedi- 
ence can  only  be  taught  by  imposing  one's  will, 


32  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

by  the  sheer  force  of  volition.  And  the  brain 
must  be  mastered  by  will-power.  The  begin- 
ning of  wise  living  lies  in  the  control  of  the  brain 
by  the  will ;  so  that  the  brain  may  act  according 
to  the  precepts  which  the  brain  itself  gives. 
With  an  obedient  disciplined  brain  a  man  may 
live  always  right  up  to  the  standard  of  his  best 
moments. 

To  teach  a  child  obedience  you  tell  it  to  do 
something,  and  you  see  that  that  something  is 
done.  The  same  with  the  brain.  Here  is  the 
foundation  of  an  efficient  life  and  the  antidote 
for  the  tendency  to  make  a  fool  of  oneself.  It 
is  marvellously  simple.  Say  to  your  brain: 
"  From  9  o'clock  to  9.30  this  morning  you  must 
dwell  without  ceasing  on  a  particular  topic  which 
I  will  give  you."  Now,  it  does  n't  matter  what 
this  topic  is  —  the  point  is  to  control  and  invig- 
orate the  brain  by  exercise  —  but  you  may  just 
as  well  give  it  a  useful  topic  to  think  over  as  a 
futile  one.  You  might  give  it  this :  "  My  brain 
is  my  servant.  I  am  not  the  plaything  of  my 
brain."  Let  it  concentrate  on  these  statements 
for  thirty  minutes.  "  What?  "  you  cry.  "  Is  this 
the  way  to  an  efficient  life?  Why,  there's  noth- 
ing in  it !  "  Simple  as  it  may  appear,  this  is  the 


THE    HUMAN   MACHINE  33 

way,  and  it  is  the  only  way.  As  for  there  being 
nothing  in  it,  try  it.  I  guarantee  that  you  will 
fail  to  keep  your  brain  concentrated  on  the  given 
idea  for  thirty  seconds  —  let  alone  thirty  min- 
utes. You  will  find  your  brain  conducting  itself 
in  a  manner  which  would  be  comic  were  it  not 
tragic.  Your  first  experiments  will  result  in  dis- 
heartening failure,  for  to  exact  from  the  brain,  at 
will  and  by  will,  concentration  on  a  given  idea 
for  even  so  short  a  period  as  half  an  hour  is  an 
exceedingly  difficult  feat  —  and  a  fatiguing!  It 
needs  perseverance.  It  needs  a  terrible  obsti- 
nacy on  the  part  of  the  will.  That  brain  of  yours 
will  be  hopping  about  all  over  the  place,  and 
every  time  it  hops  you  must  bring  it  back  by 
force  to  its  original  position.  You  must  abso- 
lutely compel  it  to  ignore  every  idea  except  the 
one  which  you  have  selected  for  its  attention. 
You  cannot  hope  to  triumph  all  at  once.  But 
you  can  hope  to  triumph.  There  is  no  royal  road 
to  the  control  of  the  brain.  There  is  no  patent 
dodge  about  it,  and  no  complicated  function 
which  a  plain  person  may  not  comprehend.  It 
is  simply  a  question  of :  "I  will,  /  will,  and  I 
'will"  (Italics  here  are  indispensable.) 

Let  me  resume.    Efficient  living,  living  up  to 


34  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

one's  best  standard,  getting  the  last  ounce  of 
power  out  of  the  machine  with  the  minimum  of 
friction:  these  things  depend  on  the  disciplined 
and  vigorous  condition  of  the  brain.  The  brain 
can  be  disciplined  by  learning  the  habit  of  obedi- 
ence. And  it  can  learn  the  habit  of  obedience 
by  the  practice  of  concentration.  Disciplinary 
concentration,  though  nothing  could  have  the  air 
of  being  simpler,  is  the  basis  of  the  whole  struc- 
ture. This  fact  must  be  grasped  imaginatively; 
it  must  be  seen  and  felt.  The  more  regularly 
concentration  is  practised,  the  more  firmly  will 
the  imagination  grasp  the  effects  of  it,  both 
direct  and  indirect.  After  but  a  few  days  of 
honest  trying  in  the  exercise  which  I  have  indi- 
cated, you  will  perceive  its  influence.  You  will 
grow  accustomed  to  the  idea,  at  first  strange  in 
its  novelty,  of  the  brain  being  external  to  the 
supreme  force  which  is  yoa,  and  in  subjection 
to  that  force.  You  will,  as  a  not  very  distant 
possibility,  see  yourself  in  possession  of  the 
power  to  switch  your  brain  on  and  off  in  a  par- 
ticular subject  as  you  switch  electricity  on  and 
off  in  a  particular  room.  The  brain  will  get  used 
to  the  straight  paths  of  obedience.  And  —  a  re- 
markable phenomenon  —  it  will,  by  the  mere 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  35 

practice  of  obedience,  become  less  forgetful  and 
more  effective.  It  will  not  so  frequently  give 
way  to  an  instinct  that  takes  it  by  surprise.  In 
a  word,  it  will  have  received  a  general  tonic. 
With  a  brain  that  is  improving  every  day  you 
can  set  about  the  perfecting  of  the  machine  in 
a  scientific  manner. 


HABIT-FORMING   BY   CONCEN- 
TRATION 

A  soon  as  the  will  has  got  the  upper  hand 
of  the  brain  —  as  soon  as  it  can  say  to 
the  brain,  with  a  fair  certainty  of  being 
obeyed :  "  Do  this.  Think  along  these  lines,  and 
continue  to  do  so  without  wandering  until  I  give 
you  leave  to  stop "  —  then  is  the  time  arrived 
when  the  perfecting  of  the  human  machine  may 
be  undertaken  in  a  large  and  comprehensive 
spirit,  as  a  city  council  undertakes  the  purifica- 
tion and  reconstruction  of  a  city.  The  tremen- 
dous possibilities  of  an  obedient  brain  will  be 
perceived  immediately  we  begin  to  reflect  upon 
what  we  mean  by  our  "  character."  Now,  a 
person's  character  is,  and  can  be,  nothing  else 
but  the  total  result  of  his  habits  of  thought.  A 
person  is  benevolent  because  he  habitually  thinks 
benevolently.  A  person  is  idle  because  his 
thoughts  dwell  habitually  on  the  instant  pleas- 
ures of  idleness.  It  is  true  that  everybody  is 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  37 

born  with  certain  predispositions,  and  that  these 
predispositions  influence  very  strongly  the  early 
formation  of  habits  of  thought.  But  the  fact 
remains  that  the  character  is  built  by  long-con- 
tinued habits  of  thought.  If  the  mature  edifice 
of  character  usually  shows  in  an  exaggerated 
form  the  peculiarities  of  the  original  predispo- 
sition, this  merely  indicates  a  probability  that 
the  slow  erection  of  the  edifice  has  proceeded  at 
haphazard,  and  that  reason  has  not  presided 
over  it.  A  child  may  be  born  with  a  tendency  to 
bent  shoulders.  If  nothing  is  done,  if  on  the 
contrary  he  becomes  a  clerk  and  abhors  gym- 
nastics, his  shoulders  will  develop  an  excessive 
roundness,  entirely  through  habit.  Whereas,  if 
his  will,  guided  by  his  reason,  had  compelled  the 
formation  of  a  corrective  physical  habit,  his 
shoulders  might  have  been,  if  not  quite  straight, 
nearly  so.  Thus  a  physical  habit!  The  same 
with  a  mental  habit. 

The  more  closely  we  examine  the  develop- 
ment of  original  predispositions,  the  more  clearly 
we  shall  see  that  this  development  is  not  inev- 
itable, is  not  a  process  which  works  itself  out 
independently  according  to  mysterious,  ruthless 
laws  which  we  cannot  understand.  For  instance, 


38  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

the  effect  of  an  original  predisposition  may  be 
destroyed  by  an  accidental  shock.  A  young  man 
with  an  inherited  tendency  to  alcohol  may  de- 
velop into  a  stern  teetotaller  through  the  shock 
caused  by  seeing  his  drunken  father  strike  his 
mother;  whereas,  if  his  father  had  chanced  to 
be  affectionate  in  drink,  the  son  might  have 
ended  in  the  gutter.  No  ruthless  law  here!  It 
is  notorious,  also,  that  natures  are  sometimes 
completely  changed  in  their  development  by 
chance  momentary  contact  with  natures  stronger 
than  themselves.  "  From  that  day  I  resolved 

• "  etc.     You  know  the  phrase.     Often  the 

resolve  is  not  kept ;  but  often  it  is  kept.  A  spark 
has  inflamed  the  will.  The  burning  will  has 
tyrannised  over  the  brain.  New  habits  have 
been  formed.  And  the  result  looks  just  like 
a  miracle. 

Now,  if  these  great  transformations  can  be 
brought  about  by  accident,  cannot  similar  trans- 
formations be  brought  about  by  a  reasonable 
design?  At  any  rate,  if  one  starts  to  bring  them 
about,  one  starts  with  the  assurance  that  trans- 
formations are  not  impossible,  since  they  have 
occurred.  One  starts  also  in  the  full  knowledge 
of  the  influence  of  habit  on  life.  Take  any  one 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  39 

of  your  own  habits,  mental  or  physical.  You 
will  be  able  to  recall  the  time  when  that  habit 
did  not  exist,  or  if  it  did  exist  it  was  scarcely 
perceptible.  And  you  will  discover  that  nearly 
all  your  habits  have  been  formed  unconsciously, 
by  daily  repetitions  which  bore  no  relation  to 
a  general  plan,  and  which  you  practised  not 
noticing.  You  will  be  compelled  to  admit  that 
your  "  character,"  as  it  is  to-day,  is  a  structure 
that  has  been  built  almost  without  the  aid  of  an 
architect;  higgledy-piggledy,  anyhow.  But  oc- 
casionally the  architect  did  step  in  and  design 
something.  Here  and  there  among  your  habits 
you  will  find  one  that  you  consciously  and  of 
deliberate  purpose  initiated  and  persevered  with 
—  doubtless  owing  to  some  happy  influence. 
What  is  the  difference  between  that  conscious 
habit  and  the  unconscious  habits?  None  what- 
ever as  regards  its  effect  on  the  sum  of  your 
character.  It  may  be  the  strongest  of  all  your 
habits.  The  only  quality  that  differentiates  it 
from  the  others  is  that  it  has  a  definite  object 
(most  likely  a  good  object),  and  that  it  wholly 
or  partially  fulfils  that  object.  There  is  not  a 
man  who  reads  these  lines  but  has,  in  this  detail 
or  that,  proved  in  himself  that  the  will,  forcing 


40  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

the  brain  to  repeat  the  same  action  again 
and  again,  can  modify  the  shape  of  his  char- 
acter as  a  sculptor  modifies  the  shape  of 
damp  clay. 

But  if  a  grown  man's  character  is  developing 
from  day  to  day  (as  it  is),  if  nine-tenths  of  the 
development  is  due  to  unconscious  action  and 
one-tenth  to  conscious  action,  and  if  the  one- 
tenth  conscious  is  the  most  satisfactory  part 
of  the  total  result;  why,  in  the  name  of  common 
sense,  henceforward,  should  not  nine-tenths,  in- 
stead of  one-tenth,  be  due  to  conscious  action? 
What  is  there  to  prevent  this  agreeable  consum- 
mation? There  is  nothing  whatever  to  prevent 
it  —  except  insubordination  on  the  part  of  the 
brain.  And  insubordination  of  the  brain  can  be 
cured,  as  I  have  previously  shown.  When  I  see 
men  unhappy  and  inefficient  in  the  craft  of  liv- 
ing, from  sheer,  crass  inattention  to  their  own 
development;  when  I  see  misshapen  men  build- 
ing up  businesses  and  empires,  and  never  stop- 
ping to  build  up  themselves;  when  I  see  dreary 
men  expending  precisely  the  same  energy  on 
teaching  a  dog  to  walk  on  its  hind-legs  as  would 
brighten  the  whole  colour  of  their  own  lives,  I 
feel  as  if  I  wanted  to  give  up  the  ghost,  so  ridic- 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  41 

ulous,  so  fatuous  does  the  spectacle  seem!  But, 
of  course,  I  do  not  give  up  the  ghost.  The  par- 
oxysm passes.  Only  I  really  must  cry  out: 
"  Can't  you  see  what  you  're  missing?  Can't  you 
see  that  you  're  missing  the  most  interesting 
thing  on  earth,  far  more  interesting  than  busi- 
nesses, empires,  and  dogs  ?  Does  n't  it  strike  you 
how  clumsy  and  short-sighted  you  are  —  work- 
ing always  with  an  inferior  machine  when 
you  might  have  a  smooth-gliding  perfection? 
Does  n't  it  strike  you  how  badly  you  are  treating 
yourself?  " 

Listen,  you  confirmed  grumbler,  you  who  make 
the  evening  meal  hideous  with  complaints  against 
destiny  —  for  it  is  you  I  will  single  out.  Are 
you  aware  what  people  are  saying  about  you 
behind  your  back?  They  are  saying  that  you 
render  yourself  and  your  family  miserable  by 
the  habit  which  has  grown  on  you  of  always 
grumbling.  "Surely  it  isn't  as  bad  as  that?" 
you  protest.  Yes,  it  is  just  as  bad  as  that.  You 
say :  "  The  fact  is,  I  know  it 's  absurd  to  grumble. 
But  I  'm  like  that.  I  've  tried  to  stop  it,  and  I 
can't!  "  How  have  you  tried  to  stop  it?  "  Well, 
I  've  made  up  my  mind  several  times  to  fight 
against  it,  but  I  never  succeed.  This  is  strictly 


42  THE   HUMAN   MACHINE 

between  ourselves.  I  don't  usually  admit  that 
I  'm  a  grumbler."  Considering  that  you  grumble 
for  about  anvhour  and  a  half  every  day  of  your 
life,  it  was  sanguine,  my  dear  sir,  to  expect  to 
cure  such  a  habit  by  means  of  a  solitary  inten- 
tion, formed  at  intervals  in  the  brain  and  then 
forgotten.  No!.  You  must  do  more  than  that* 
If  you  will  daily  fix  your  brain  firmly  for  half 
an  hour  on  the  truth  (you  know  it  to  be  a  truth) 
that  grumbling  is  absurd  and  futile,  your  brain 
will  henceforward  begin  to  form  a  habit  in  that 
direction;  it  will  begin  to  be  moulded  to  the 
idea  that  grumbling  is  absurd  and  futile.  In  odd 
moments,  when  it  isn't  thinking  of  anything  in 
particular,  it  will  suddenly  remember  that  grum- 
bling is  absurd  and  futile.  When  you  sit  down 
to  the  meal  and  open  your  mouth  to  say :  *'  I 
can't  think  what  my  ass  of  a  partner  means 
by  — — "  it  will  remember  that  grumbling  is 
absurd  and  futile,  and  will  alter  the  arrange- 
ment of  your  throat,  teeth,  and  tongue,  so  that 
you  will  say :  "  What  fine  weather  we  're  hav- 
ing ! "  In  brief,  it  will  remember  involuntarily, 
by  a  new  habit.  All  who  look  into,  their  experi- 
ence will  admit  that  the  failure  to  replace  old 
habits  by  new  ones  is  due  to  the  fact  that  at  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  43 

critical  moment  the  brain  does  not  remember;  it 
simply  forgets.  The  practice  of  concentration 
will  cure  that.  All  depends  on  regular  concen- 
tration. This  grumbling  is  an  instance,  though 
chosen  not  quite  at  hazard. 


VI 
LORD   OVER  THE   NODDLE 

HAVING  proved  by  personal  experiment 
the  truth  of  the  first  of  the  two  great 
principles  which  concern  the  human 
machine  —  namely,  that  the  brain  is  a  servant, 
not  a  master,  and  can  be  controlled  —  we  may  now 
come  to  the  second.  The  second  is  more  funda- 
mental than  the  first,  but  it  can  be  of  no  use 
until  the  first  is  understood  and  put  into  practice. 
The  human  machine  is  an  apparatus  of  brain 
and  muscle  for  enabling  the  Ego  to  develop  freely 
in  the  universe  by  which  it  is  surrounded,  with- 
out friction.  Its  function  is  to  convert  the  facts 
of  the  universe  to  the  best  advantage  of  the 
Ego.  The  facts  of  the  universe  are  the  material 
with  which  it  is  its  business  to  deal  —  not  the 
facts  of  an  ideal  universe,  but  the  facts  of  this 
universe.  Hence,  when  friction  occurs,  when 
the  facts  of  the  universe  cease  to  be  of  advantage 
to  the  Ego,  the  fault  is  in  the  machine.  It  is  not 
the  solar  system  that  has  gone  wrong,  but  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  45 

human  machine.  Second  great  principle,  there- 
fore :  "  In  case  of  friction,  the  machine  is  always 
at  fault/' 

You  can  control  nothing  but  your  own  mind. 
Even  your  two-year-old  babe  may  defy  you  by 
the  instinctive  force  of  its  personality.  But  your 
own  mind  you  can  control.  Your  own  mind  is 
a  sacred  enclosure  into  which  nothing  harmful 
can  enter  except  by  your  permission.  Your  own 
mind  has  the  power  to  transmute  every  external 
phenomenon  to  its  own  purposes.  If  happiness 
arises  from  cheerfulness,  kindliness,  and  recti- 
tude (and  who  will  deny  it?),  what  possible  com- 
bination of  circumstances  is  going  to  make  you 
unhappy  so  long  as  the  machine  remains  in 
order?  If  self-development  consists  in  the  utili- 
sation of  one's  environment  (not  utilisation  of 
somebody  else's  environment),  how  can  your 
environment  prevent  you  from  developing?  You 
would  look  rather  foolish  without  it,  anyway. 
In  that  noddle  of  yours  is  everything  necessary 
for  development,  for  the  maintaining  of  dignity, 
for  the  achieving  of  happiness,  and  you  are  abso- 
lute lord  over  the  noddle,  will  you  but  exercise 
the  powers  of  lordship.  Why  worry  about  the 
contents  of  somebody  else's  noddle,  in  which 


46  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

you  can  be  nothing  but  an  intruder,  when  you 
may  arrive  at  a  better  result,  with  absolute  cer- 
tainty, by  confining  your  activities  to  your  own? 
"  Look  within."  "  The  Kingdom  of  Heaven 
is  within  you."  "  Oh,  yes !  "  you  protest.  "  All 
that's  old.  Epictetus  said  that.  Marcus  Aure- 
lius  said  that.  Christ  said  that."  They  did.  I  ad- 
mit it  readily.  But  if  you  were  ruffled  this  morn- 
ing because  your  motor-omnibus  broke  down, 
and  you  had  to  take  a  cab,  then  so  far  as  you  are 
concerned  these  great  teachers  lived  in  vain. 
You,  calling  yourself  a  reasonable  man,  are 
going  about  dependent  for  your  happiness,  dig- 
nity, and  growth,  upon  a  thousand  things  over 
which  you  have  no  control,  and  the  most  exqui- 
sitely organised  machine  for  ensuring  happiness, 
dignity,  and  growth,  is  rusting  away  inside  you. 
And  all  because  you  have  a  sort  of  notion  that 
a  saying  said  two  thousand  years  ago  cannot  be 
practical. 

You  remark  sagely  to  your  child :  "  No,  my 
child,  you  cannot  have  that  moon,  and  you  will 
accomplish  nothing  by  crying  for  it.  Now,  here 
is  this  beautiful  box  of  bricks,  by  means  of  which 
you  may  amuse  yourself  while  learning  many 
wonderful  matters  and  improving  your  mind. 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  47 

You  must  try  to  be  content  with  what  you  have, 
and  to  make  the  best  of  it.  If  you  had  the  moon 
you  wouldn't  be  any  happier."  Then  you  lie 
awake  half  the  night  repining  because  the  last 
post  has  brought  a  letter  to  the  effect  that  "  the 
Board  cannot  entertain  your  application  for," 
etc.  You  say  the  two  cases  are  not  alike.  They 
are  not.  Your  child  has  never  heard  of  Epicte- 
tus.  On  the  other  hand,  justice  is  the  moon. 
At  your  age  you  surely  know  that.  "  But  the 
Directors  ought  to  have  granted  my  application," 
you  insist.  Exactly!  I  agree.  But  we  are  not 
in  a  universe  of  oughts.  You  have  a  special 
apparatus  within  you  for  dealing  with  a  universe 
where  oughts  are  flagrantly  disregarded.  And 
you  are  not  using  it.  You  are  lying  awake,  keep- 
ing your  wife  awake,  injuring  your  health,  in- 
juring hers,  losing  your  dignity  and  your  cheer- 
fulness. Why?  Because  you  think  that  these 
antics  and  performances  will  influence  the  Board? 
Because  you  think  that  they  will  put  you  into  a 
better  condition  for  dealing  with  your  environ- 
ment to-morrow?  Not  a  bit.  Simply  because 
the  machine  is  at  fault. 

In  certain  cases  we  do  make  use  of  our  ma- 
chines (as  well  as  their  sad  condition  of  neglec': 


48  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

will  allow),  but  in  other  cases  we  behave  in  an 
extraordinarily  irrational  manner.  Thus  if  we 
sally  out  and  get  caught  in  a  heavy  shower  we 
do  not,  unless  very  far  gone  in  foolishness,  sit 
down  and  curse  the  weather.  We  put  up  our 
umbrella,  if  we  have  one,  and  if  not  we  hurry 
home.  We  may  grumble,  but  it  is  not  serious 
grumbling;  we  accept  the  shower  as  a  fact  of 
the  universe,  and  control  ourselves.  Thus  also, 
if  by  a  sudden  catastrophe  we  lose  somebody 
who  is  important  to  us,  we  grieve,  but  we  con- 
trol ourselves,  recognising  one  of  those  hazards 
of  destiny  from  which  not  even  millionaires  are 
exempt.  And  the  result  on  our  Ego  is  usually 
to  improve  it  in  essential  respects.  But  there 
are  other  strokes  of  destiny,  other  facts  of  the 
universe,  against  which  we  protest  as  a  child 
protests '  when  deprived  of  the  moon. 

Take  the  case  of  an  individual  with  an  imper- 
fect idea  of  honesty.  Now,  that  individual  is 
the  consequence  of  his  father  and  mother  and 
his  environment,  and  his  father  and  mother  of 
theirs,  and  so  backwards  to  the  single-celled 
protoplasm.  That  individual  is  a  result  of  the 
cosmic  order,  the  inevitable  product  of  cause  and 
effect.  We  know  that.  We  must  admit  that  he 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  49 

is  just  as  much  a  fact  of  the  universa  as  a  shower 
of  rain  or  a  storm  at  sea  that  swallows  a  ship. 
We  freely  grant  in  the  abstract  that  there  must 
be,  at  the  present  stage  of  evolution,  a  certain 
number  of  persons  with  unfair  minds.  We  are1 
quite  ready  to  contemplate  such  an  individual 
with  philosophy  —  until  it  happens  that,  in  the 
course  of  the  progress  of  the  solar  system,  he 
runs  up  against  ourselves.  Then  listen  to  the 
outcry!  Listen  to  the  continual  explosions  of  a 
righteous  man  aggrieved!  The  individual  may 
be  our  clerk,  cashier,  son,  father,  brother,  part- 
ner, wife,  employer.  We  are  ill-used!  We  are 
being  treated  unfairly!  We  kick;  we  scream. 
We  nourish  the  inward  sense  of  grievance  that 
eats  the  core  out  of  content.  We  sit  down  in 
the  rain.  We  decline  to  think  of  umbrellas,  or 
to  run  to  shelter. 

We  care  not  that  that  individual  is  a  fact  which 
the  universe  has  been  slowly  manufacturing  for 
millions  of  years.  Our  attitude  implies  that  we 
want  eternity  to  roll  back  and  begin  again,  in 
such  wise  that  we  at  any  rate  shall  not  be  dis- 
turbed. Though  we  have  a  machine  for  the  trans- 
mutation of  facts  into  food  for  our  growth,  we 
do  not  dream  of  using  it.  But  we  say,  he  is 


5o  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

doing  us  harm!  Where?  In  our  minds.  He  has 
robbed  us  of  our  peace,  our  comfort,  our  happi- 
ness, our  good  temper.  Even  if  he  has,  we  might 
just  as  well  inveigh  against  a  shower.  But  has 
he?  What  was  our  brain  doing  while  this 
naughty  person  stepped  in  and  robbed  us  of  the 
only  possessions  worth  having?  No,  no!  It  is 
not  that  he  has  done  us  harm  —  the  one  cheerful 
item  in  a  universe  of  stony  facts  is  that  no  one 
can  harm  anybody  except  himself  —  it  is  merely 
that  we  have  been  silly,  precisely  as  silly  as  if 
we  had  taken  a  seat  in  the  rain  with  a  folded 
umbrella  by  our  side.  .  .  .  The  machine  is  at 
fault.  I  fancy  we  are  now  obtaining  glimpses 
of  what  that  phrase  really  means. 


VII 
WHAT  "LIVING"   CHIEFLY  IS 

IT  is  in  intercourse  —  social,  sentimental,  or 
business  —  with  one's  fellows  that  the 
qualities  and  the  condition  of  the  human 
machine  are  put  to  the  test  and  strained.  That 
part  of  my  life  which  I  conduct  by  myself,  with- 
out reference  —  or  at  any  rate  without  direct 
reference  —  to  others,  I  can  usually  manage  in 
such  a  way  that  the  gods  do  not  positively  weep 
at  the  spectacle  thereof.  My  environment  is 
simpler,  less  puzzling,  when  I  am  alone,  my 
calm  and  my  self-control  less  liable  to  violent 
fluctuations.  Impossible  to  be  disturbed  by  a 
chair!  Impossible  that  a  chair  should  get  on 
one's  nerves!  Impossible  to  blame  a  chair  for 
not  being  as  reasonable,  as  archangelic  as  I  am 
myself!  But  when  it  comes  to  people!  .  .  . 
Well,  that  is  "living,"  then!  The  art  of  life, 
the  art  of  extracting  all  its  power  from  the  human 
machine,  does  not  lie  chiefly  in  processes  of 


52  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

bookish-culture,  nor  in  contemplations  of  the 
beauty  and  majesty  of  existence.  It  lies  chiefly 
in  keeping  the  peace,  the  whole  peace,  and  noth- 
ing but  the  peace,  with  those  with  whom  one  is 
"  thrown."  Is  it  in  sitting  ecstatic  over  Shelley, 
Shakespeare,  or  Herbert  Spencer,  solitary  in  my 
room  of  a  night,  that  I  am  "  improving  myself  " 
and  learning  to  live?  Or  is  it  in  watching  over 
all  my  daily  human  contacts?  Do  not  seek  to 
escape  the  comparison  by  insinuating  that  I 
despise  study,  or  by  pointing  out  that  the  eternal 
verities  are  beyond  dailiness.  Nothing  of  the 
kind !  I  am  so  "  silly  "  about  books  that  merely 
to  possess  them  gives  me  pleasure.  And  if  the 
verities  are  good  for  eternity  they  ought  to  be 
good  for  a  day.  If  I  cannot  exchange  them  for 
daily  coin  —  if  I  can't  buy  happiness  for  a  single 
day  because  I  've  nothing  less  than  an  eternal 
verity  about  me  and  nobody  has  sufficient  change 
—  then  my  eternal  verity  is  not  an  eternal  verity. 
It  is  merely  an  unnegotiable  bit  of  glass  (called 
a  diamond),  or  even  a  note  on  the  Bank  of 
Engraving. 

I  can  say  to  myself  when  I  arise  in  the  morn- 
ing :  "  I  am  master  of  my  brain.  No  one  can 
get  in  there  and  rage  about  like  a  bull  in  a  china  • 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  53 

shop.  If  my  companions  on  the  planet's  crust 
choose  to  rage  about  they  cannot  affect  me  I  I 
will  not  let  them.  I  have  power  to  maintain  my 
own  calm,  and  I  will.  No  earthly  being  can  force 
me  to  be  false  to  my  principles,  or  to  be  blind 
to  the  beauty  of  the  universe,  or  to  be  gloomy, 
or  to  be  irritable,  or  to  complain  against  my  lot. 
For  these  things  depend  on  the  brain;  cheer- 
fulness, kindliness,  and  honest  thinking  are  all 
within  the  department  of  the  brain.  The  dis- 
ciplined brain  can  accomplish  them.  And  my 
brain  is  disciplined,  and  I  will  discipline  it  more 
and  more  as  the  days  pass.  I  am,  therefore,  in- 
dependent of  hazard,  and  I  will  back  myself  to 
conduct  all  intercourse  as  becomes  a  rational 
creature."  ...  I  can  say  this.  I  can  ram  this 
argument  by  force  of  will  into  my  brain,  and  by 
dint  of  repeating  it  often  enough  I  shall  assur- 
edly arrive  at  the  supreme  virtues  of  reason.  I 
should  assuredly  conquer  —  the  brain  being  such 
a  machine  of  habit  —  even  if  I  did  not  take  the 
trouble  to  consider  in  the  slightest  degree  what 
manner  of  things  my  fellow-men  are  —  by  acting 
merely  in  my  own  interests.  But  the  way  of 
perfection  (I  speak  relatively)  will  be  immensely 
shortened  and  smoothed  if  I  do  consider,  dis- 


54  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

passionately,  the  case  of  the  other  human  ma- 
chines.   Thus :  — 

The  truth  is  that  my  attitude  towards  my  fel- 
lows is  fundamentally  and  totally  wrong,  and 
that  it  entails  on  my  thinking  machine  a  strain 
which  is  quite  unnecessary,  though  I  may  have 
arranged  the  machine  so  as  to  withstand  the 
strain  successfully.  The  secret  of  smooth  living 
is  a  calm  cheerfulness  which  will  leave  me  always 
in  full  possession  of  my  reasoning  faculty  —  in 
order  that  I  may  live  by  reason  instead  of  by 
instinct  and  momentary  passion.  The  secret  of 
calm  cheerfulness  is  kindliness;  no  person  can 
be  consistently  cheerful  and  calm  who  does  not 
consistently  think  kind  thoughts.  But  how  can 
I  be  kindly  when  I  pass  the  major  portion  of 
my  time  in  blaming  the  people  who  surround 
me  —  who  are  part  of  my  environment?  If  I, 
blaming,  achieve  some  approach  to  kindliness,  it 
is  only  by  a  great  and  exhausting  effort  of  self- 
mastery.  The  inmost  secret,  then,  lies  in  not 
blaming,  in  not  judging  and  emitting  verdicts. 
Oh !  I  do  not  blame  by  word  of  mouth !  I  am  far 
too  advanced  for  such  a  puerility.  I  keep  the 
blame  in  my  own  breast,  where  it  festers.  I  am 
always  privately  forgiving,  which  is  bad  for  me. 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  55 

Because,  you  know,  there  is  nothing  to  forgive. 
I  do  not  have  to  forgive  bad  weather;  nor,  if  I 
found  myself  in  an  earthquake,  should  I  have  to 
forgive  the  earthquake. 

All  blame,  uttered  or  unexpressed,  is  wrong.  I 
do  not  blame  myself.  I  can  explain  myself  to 
myself.  I  can  invariably  explain  myself.  If  I 
forged  a  friend's  name  on  a  cheque  I  should  ex- 
plain the  affair  quite  satisfactorily  to  myself. 
And  instead  of  blaming  myself  I  should  sympa- 
thise with  myself  for  having  been  driven  into 
such  an  excessively  awkward  corner.  Let  me 
examine  honestly  my  mental  processes,  and  I 
must  admit  that  my  attitude  towards  others  is 
entirely  different  from  my  attitude  towards  my- 
self. I  must  admit  that  in  the  seclusion  of  my 
mind,  though  I  say  not  a  word,  I  am  constantly 
blaming  others  because  I  am  not  happy.  When- 
ever I  bump  up  against  an  opposing  personality 
and  my  smooth  progress  is  impeded,  I  secretly 
blame  the  opposer.  I  act  as  though  I  had  shouted 
to  the  world :  "  Clear  out  of  the  way,  everyone, 
for  /  am  coming !  "  Everyone  does  not  clear 
out  of  the  way.  I  did  not  really  expect  everyone 
to  clear  out  of  the  way.  But  I  act,  within,  as 
though  I  had  so  expected.  I  blame.  Hence 


56  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

kindliness,  hence  cheerfulness,  is  rendered  vastly 
more  difficult  for  me. 

What  I  ought  to  do  is  this !  I  ought  to  reflect 
again  and  again,  and  yet  again,  that  the  beings 
among  whom  I  have  to  steer,  the  living  environ- 
ment out  of  which  I  have  to  manufacture  my 
happiness,  are  just  as  inevitable  in  the  scheme 
of  evolution  as  I  am  myself;  have  just  as  much 
right  to  be  themselves  as  I  have  to  be  myself; 
are  precisely  my  equals  in  the  face  of  Nature; 
are  capable  of  being  explained  as  I  am  capable 
of  being  explained ;  are  entitled  to  the  same  lati- 
tude as  I  am  entitled  to,  and  are  no  more  respon- 
sible for  their  composition  and  their  environment 
than  I  for  mine.  I  ought  to  reflect  again  and 
again,  and  yet  again,  that  they  all  deserve  from 
me  as  much  sympathy  as  I  give  to  myself.  Why 
not?  Having  thus  reflected  in  a  general  manner, 
I  ought  to  take  one  by  one  the  individuals  with 
whom  I  am  brought  into  frequent  contact,  and 
seek,  by  a  deliberate  effort  of  the  imagination 
and  the  reason,  to  understand  them,  to  under- 
stand why  they  act  thus  and  thus,  what  their 
difficulties  are,  what  their  "  explanation  "  is,  and 
how  friction  can  be  avoided.  So  I  ought  to  re- 
flect, morning  after  morning,  until  my  brain  is 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  57 

saturated  with  the  cases  of  these  individuals. 
Here  is  a  course  of  discipline.  If  I  follow  it  I 
shall  gradually  lose  the  preposterous  habit  of 
blaming,  and  I  shall  have  laid  the  foundations  of 
that  quiet,  unshakable  self-possession  which  is 
the  indispensable  preliminary  of  conduct  accord- 
ing to  reason,  of  thorough  efficiency  in  the  ma- 
chine of  happiness.  But  something  in  me, 
something  distinctly  base,  says :  "  Yes.  The  put- 
yourself-in-his-place  business  over  again!  The 
do-unto-others  business  over  again !  "  Just  so ! 
Something  in  me  is  ashamed  of  being  "  moral." 
(You  all  know  the  feeling!)  Well,  morals  are 
naught  but  another  name  for  reasonable  con- 
duct; a  higher  and  more  practical  form  of  ego- 
tism—  an  egotism  which,  while  freeing  others, 
frees  myself.  I  have  tried  the  lower  form  of 
egotism.  And  it  has  failed.  If  I  am  afraid  of 
being  moral,  if  I  prefer  to  cut  off  my  nose  to 
spite  my  face,  well,  I  must  accept  the  conse- 
quences. But  truth  will  prevail. 


VIII 
THE   DAILY  FRICTION 

IT  is  with  common  daily  affairs  that  I  am 
now  dealing,  not  with  heroic  enterprises, 
ambitions,  martyrdoms.  Take  the  day,  the 
ordinary  day  in  the  ordinary  house  or  office. 
Though  it  comes  seven  times  a  week,  and  is  the 
most  banal  thing  imaginable,  it  is  quite  worth  at- 
tention. How  does  the  machine  get  through  it? 
Ah!  the  best  that  can  be  said  of  the  machine  is 
that  it  does  get  through  it,  somehow.  The  fric- 
tion, though  seldom  such  as  to  bring  matters  to 
a  standstill,  is  frequent  —  the  sort  of  friction  that, 
when  it  occurs  in  a  bicycle,  is  just  sufficient  to 
annoy  the  rider,  but  not  sufficient  to  make  him 
get  off  the  machine  and  examine  the  bearings. 
Occasionally  the  friction  is  very  loud;  indeed, 
disturbing,  and  at  rarer  intervals  it  shrieks,  like 
an  omnibus  brake  out  of  order.  You  know  those 
days  when  you  have  the  sensation  that  life  is 
not  large  enough  to  contain  the  household  or  the 
office-staff,  when  the  business  of  intercourse  may 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  59 

be  compared  to  the  manoeuvres  of  two  people 
who,  having  awakened  with  a  bad  headache,  are 
obliged  to  dress  simultaneously  in  a  very  small 
bedroom.  "  After  you  with  that  towel !  "  in  ac- 
cents of  bitter,  grinding  politeness.  "  If  you 
could  kindly  move  your  things  off  this  chair !  " 
in  a  voice  that  would  blow  brains  out  if  it  were 
a  bullet.  I  venture  to  say  that  you  know  those 
days.  "  But,"  you  reply,  "  such  days  are  few. 
Usually  ...  ! "  Well,  usually,  the  friction, 
though  less  intense,  is  still  proceeding.  We  grow 
accustomed  to  it.  We  scarcely  notice  it,  as  a 
person  in  a  stuffy  chamber  will  scarcely  notice 
the  stuffiness.  But  the  deteriorating  influence 
due  to  friction  goes  on,  even  if  unperceived.  And 
one  morning  we  perceive  its  ravages  —  and  write 
a  letter  to  the  Telegraph  to  inquire  whether  life 
is  worth  living,  or  whether  marriage  is  a  failure, 
or  whether  men  are  more  polite  than  women. 
The  proof  that  friction,  in  various  and  varying 
degrees,  is  practically  continuous  in  most  house- 
holds lies  in  the  fact  that  when  we  chance  on  a 
household  where  there  is  no  friction  we  are 
startled.  We  can't  recover  from  the  phenome- 
non. And  in  describing  this  household  to  our 
friends,  we  say :  V  They  get  on  so  well  together," 


60  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

as  if  we  were  saying :  "  They  have  wings  and 
can  fly!  Just  fancy!  Did  you  ever  hear  of  such 
a  thing?  " 

Ninety  per  cent  of  all  daily  friction  is  caused 
by  tone —  mere  tone  of  voice.  Try  this  experi- 
ment. Say :  "  Oh,  you  little  darling,  you  sweet 
pet,  you  entirely  charming  creature !  "  to  a  baby 
or  a  dog;  but  roar  these  delightful  epithets  in 
the  tone  of  saying:  "You  infernal  little  nui- 
sance !  If  I  hear  another  sound  I  '11  break  every 
bone  in  your  body !  "  The  baby  will  infallibly 
whimper,  and  the  dog  will  infallibly  mouch  off. 
True,  a  dog  is  not  a  human  being,  neither  is  a 
baby.  They  cannot  understand.  It  is  precisely 
because  they  cannot  understand  and  articulate 
words  that  the  experiment  is  valuable;  for  it 
separates  the  effect  of  the  tone  from  the  effect  of 
the  words  spoken.  He  who  speaks,  speaks  twice. 
His  words  convey  his  thought,  and  his  tone  con- 
veys his  mental  attitude  towards  the  person 
spoken  to.  And  certainly  the  attitude,  so  far  as 
friction  goes,  is  more  important  than  the  thought. 
Your  wife  may  say  to  you :  "  I  shall  buy  that 
hat  I  spoke  to  you  about."  And  you  may  reply, 
quite  sincerely,  "  As  you  please."  But  it  will 
depend  on  your  tone  whether  you  convey :  "  As 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  61 

you  please.  I  am  sympathetically  anxious  that 
your  innocent  caprices  should  be  indulged."  Or 
whether  you  convey :  "  As  you  please.  Only 
don't  bother  me  with  hats.  I  am  above  hats.  A 
great  deal  too  much  money  is  spent  in  this  house 
on  hats.  However,  I  'm  helpless !  "  Or  whether 
you  convey :  "  As  you  please,  heart  of  my  heart, 
but  if  you  would  like  to  be  a  nice  girl,  go  gently. 
We  're  rather  tight."  I  need  not  elaborate.  I 
am  sure  of  being  comprehended. 

As  tone  is  the  expression  of  attitude,  it  is,  of 
course,  caused  by  attitude.  The  frictional  tone 
is  chiefly  due  to  that  general  attitude  of  blame 
which  I  have  already  condemned  as  being  absurd 
and  unjustifiable.  As,  by  constant  watchful  dis- 
cipline, we  gradually  lose  this  silly  attitude  of 
blame,  so  the  tone  will  of  itself  gradually  change. 
But  the  two  ameliorations  can  proceed  together, 
and  it  is  a  curious  thing  that  an  agreeable  tone, 
artificially  and  deliberately  adopted,  will  influ- 
ence the  mental  attitude  almost  as  much  as  the 
mental  attitude  will  influence  the  tone.  If  you 
honestly  feel  resentful  against  someone,  but, 
having  understood  the  foolishness  of  fury,  inten- 
tionally mask  your  fury  under  a  persuasive  tone, 
your  fury  will  at  once  begin  to  abate.  You  will 


62  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

be  led  into  a  rational  train  of  thought;  you  will 
see  that  after  all  the  object  of  your  resentment 
has  a  right  to  exist,  and  that  he  is  neither  a  door- 
mat nor  a  scoundrel,  and  that  anyhow  nothing 
is  to  be  gained,  and  much  is  to  be  lost,  by  fury. 
You  will  see  that  fury  is  unworthy  of  you. 

Do  you  remember  the  gentleness  of  the  tone 
which  you  employed  after  the  healing  of  your 
first  quarrel  with  a  beloved  companion?  Do  you 
remember  the  persuasive  tone  which  you  used 
when  you  wanted  to  obtain  something  from  a 
difficult  person  on  whom  your  happiness  de- 
pended? Why  should  not  your  tone  always 
combine  these  qualities?  Why  should  you  not 
carefully  school  your  tone?  Is  it  beneath  you 
to  ensure  the  largest  possible  amount  of  your 
own  "  way  "  by  the  simplest  means?  Or  is  there 
at  the  back  of  your  mind  that  peculiarly  English 
and  German  idea  that  politeness,  sympathy,  and 
respect  for  another  immortal  soul  would  imply 
deplorable  weakness  on  your  part?  You  say  that 
your  happiness  does  not  depend  on  every  person 
whom  you  happen  to  speak  to.  Yes,  it  does. 
Your  happiness  is  always  dependent  on  just  that 
person.  Produce  friction,  and  you  suffer.  Idle 
to  argue  that  the  person  has  no  business  to  be 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  63 

upset  by  your  tone !  You  have  caused  avoidable 
friction,  simply  because  your  machine  for  deal- 
ing with  your  environment  was  suffering  from 
pride,  ignorance,  or  thoughtlessness.  You  say  I 
am  making  a  mountain  out  of  a  mole-hill.  No! 
I  am  making  a  mountain  out  of  ten  million  mole- 
hills. And  that  is  what  life  does.  It  is  the  little 
but  continuous  causes  that  have  great  effects.  I 
repeat:  Why  not  deliberately  adopt  a  gentle, 
persuasive  tone  —  just  to  see  what  the  results 
are?  Surely  you  are  not  ashamed  to  be  wise. 
You  may  smile  superiorly  as  you  read  this.  Yet 
you  know  very  well  that  more  than  once  you 
have  resolved  to  use  a  gentle  and  persuasive  tone 
on  all  occasions,  and  that  the  sole  reason  why 
you  had  that  fearful  shindy  yesterday  with  your 
cousin's  sister-in-law  was  that  you  had  long  since 
failed  to  keep  your  resolve.  But  you  were  of 
my  mind  once,  and  more  than  once. 

What  you  have  to  do  is  to  teach  the  new  habit 
to  your  brain  by  daily  concentration  on  it;  by 
forcing  your  brain  to  think  of  nothing  else  for 
half  an  hour  of  a  morning.  After  a  time  the  brain 
will  begin  to  remember  automatically.  For,  of 
course,  the  explanation  of  your  previous  fail- 
ures is  that  your  brain,  undisciplined,  merely 


64  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

forgot  at  the  critical  moment.  The  tone  was  out 
of  your  mouth  before  your  brain  had  waked  up. 
It  is  necessary  to  watch,  as  though  you  were  a 
sentinel,  not  only  against  the  wrong  tone,  but 
against  the  other  symptoms  of  the  attitude  of 
blame.  Such  as  the  frown.  It  is  necessary  to 
regard  yourself  constantly,  and  in  minute  detail. 
You  lie  in  bed  for  half  an  hour  and  enthusiasti- 
cally concentrate  on  this  beautiful  new  scheme 
of  the  right  tone.  You  rise,  and  because  you 
don't  achieve  a  proper  elegance  of  necktie  at  the 
first  knotting,  you  frown  and  swear  and  clench 
your  teeth!  There  is  a  symptom  of  the  wrong 
attitude  towards  your  environment.  You  are 
awake,  but  your  brain  is  n't.  It  is  in  such  a 
symptom  that  you  may  judge  yourself.  And  not 
a  trifling  symptom,  either!  If  you  will  frown 
at  a  necktie,  if  you  will  use  language  to  a  necktie 
which  no  gentleman  should  use  to  a  necktie, 
what  will  you  be  capable  of  to  a  responsible 
being?  .  .  .  Yes,  it  is  very  difficult.  But  it  can 
be  done. 


IX 

"  FIRE ! " 

IN  this  business  of  daily  living,  of  ordinary 
usage  of  the  machine  in  hourly  intercourse, 
there  occurs  sometimes  a  phenomenon 
which  is  the  cause  of  a  great  deal  of  trouble,  and 
the  result  of  a  very  ill-tended  machine.  It  is  a 
phenomenon  impossible  to  ignore,  and  yet,  so 
shameful  is  it,  so  degrading,  so  shocking,  so 
miserable,  that  I  hesitate  to  mention  it.  For  one 
class  of  reader  is  certain  to  ridicule  me,  loftily 
saying :  "  One  really  does  n't  expect  to  find  this 
sort  of  thing  in  print  nowadays !  "  And  another 
class  of  reader  is  certain  to  get  angry.  Never- 
theless, as  one  of  my  main  objects  in  the  present 
book  is  to  discuss  matters  which  "people  don't 
talk  about,"  I  shall  discuss  this  matter.  But  my 
diffidence  in  doing  so  is  such  that  I  must  ap- 
proach it  deviously,  describing  it  first  by  means 
of  a  figure. 

Imagine  that,  looking  at  a  man's  house,  you 
suddenly  perceive  it  to  be  on  fire.    The  flame  is 


66  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

scarcely  perceptible.  You  could  put  it  out  if 
you  had  a  free  hand.  But  you  have  not  got  a 
free  hand.  It  is  his  house,  not  yours.  He  may 
or  may  not  know  that  his  house  is  burning.  You 
are  aware  by  experience,  however,  that  if  you 
directed  his  attention  to  the  flame,  the  effect  of 
your  warning  would  be  exceedingly  singular, 
almost  incredible.  For  the  effect  would  be  that 
he  would  instantly  begin  to  strike  matches,  pour 
on  petroleum,  and  fan  the  flame,  violently  re- 
senting interference.  Therefore  you  can  only 
stand  and  watch,  hoping  that  he  will  notice  the 
flames  before  they  are  beyond  control,  and  ex- 
tinguish them.  The  probability  is,  however, 
that  he  will  notice  the  flames  too  late.  And, 
powerless  to  avert  disaster,  you  are  condemned, 
therefore,  to  watch  the  damage  of  valuable  prop- 
erty. The  flames  leap  higher  and  higher,  and 
they  do  not  die  down  till  they  have  burned  them- 
selves out.  You  avert  your  gaze  from  the 
spectacle,  and  until  you  are  gone  the  owner 
of  the  house  pretends  that  nothing  has  oc- 
curred. When  alone,  he  curses  himself  for  his 
carelessness. 

The  foregoing  is  meant  to  be  a  description  of 
what  happens  when  a  man  passes  through  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  67 

incendiary  experience  known  as  "losing  his 
temper."  (There!  the  cat  of  my  chapter  is  out 
of  the  bag!)  A  man  who  has  lost  his  temper  is 
simply  being  "burnt  out."  His  constitutes  one 
of  the  most  curious  and  (for  everybody)  humili- 
ating spectacles  that  life  offers.  It  is  an  insur- 
rection, a  boiling-over,  a  sweeping  storm.  Dig- 
nity, common  sense,  justice  are  shrivelled  up 
and  destroyed.  Anarchy  reigns.  The  devil  has 
broken  his  chain.  Instinct  is  stamping  on  the 
face  of  reason.  And  in  that  man  civilisation  has 
temporarily  receded  millions  of  years.  Of  course, 
the  thing  amounts  to  a  nervous  disease,  and  I 
think  it  is  almost  universal.  You  at  once  pro- 
test that  you  never  lose  your  temper  —  have  n't 
lost  your  temper  for  ages !  But  do  you  not  mean 
that  you  have  not  smashed  furniture  for  ages? 
These  fires  are  of  varying  intensities.  Some  of 
them  burn  very  dully.  Yet  they  burn.  One  man 
loses  his  temper ;  another  is  merely  "  ruffled." 
But  the  event  is  the  same  in  kind.  When  you  are 
"  ruffled,"  when  you  are  conscious  of  a  resentful 
vibration  that  surprises  all  your  being,  when 
your  voice  changes,  when  you  notice  a  change 
in  the  demeanour  of  your  companion,  who  sees 
that  he  has  "  touched  a  tender  point,"  you  may 


68  THE    HUMAN   MACHINE 

not  go  to  the  length  of  smashing  furniture,  but 
you  have  had  a  fire,  and  your  dignity  is  dam- 
aged. You  admit  it  to  yourself  afterwards.  I 
am  sure  you  know  what  I  mean.  And  I  am 
nearly  sure  that  you,  with  your  courageous  can- 
dour, will  admit  that  from  time  to  time  you  suffer 
from  these  mysterious  "  fires." 

"  Temper,"  one  of  the  plagues  of  human  soci- 
ety, is  generally  held  to  be  incurable,  save  by 
the  vague  process  of  exercising  self-control  —  a 
process  which  seldom  has  any  beneficial  results. 
It  is  regarded  now  as  small-pox  used  to  be  re- 
garded—  as  a  visitation  of  Providence,  which 
must  be  borne.  But  I  do  not  hold  it  to  be  in- 
curable. I  am  convinced  that  it  is  permanently 
curable.  And  its  eminent  importance  as  a  nui- 
sance to  mankind  at  large  deserves,  I  think,  that 
it  should  receive  particular  attention.  Anyhow, 
I  am  strongly  against  the  visitation  of  Provi- 
dence theory,  as  being  unscientific,  primitive, 
and  conducive  to  unashamed  laissez-aller.  A 
man  can  be  master  in  his  own  house.  If  he  can- 
not be  master  by  simple  force  of  will,  he  can  be 
master  by  ruse  and  wile.  I  would  employ  clever- 
ness to  maintain  the  throne  of  reason  when  it  is 
likely  to  be  upset  in  the  mind  by  one  of  these 


THE    HUMAN   MACHINE  69 

devastating  and  disgraceful  insurrections  of  brute 
instinct. 

It  is  useless  for  a  man  in  the  habit  of  losing 
or  mislaying  his  temper  to  argue  with  himself 
that  such  a  proceeding  is  folly,  that  it  serves  no 
end,  and  does  nothing  but  harm.  It  is  useless 
for  him  to  argue  that  in  allowing  his  temper  to 
stray  he  is  probably  guilty  of  cruelty,  and  cer- 
tainly guilty  of  injustice  to  those  persons  who 
are  forced  to  witness  the  loss.  It  is  useless  for 
him  to  argue  that  a  man  of  uncertain  temper  in 
a  house  is  like  a  man  who  goes  about  a  house 
with  a  loaded  revolver  sticking  from  his  pocket, 
and  that  all  considerations  of  fairness  and  reason 
have  to  be  subordinated  in  that  house  to  the 
fear  of  the  revolver,  and  that  such  peace  as  is 
maintained  in  that  house  is  often  a  shameful  and 
an  unjust  peace.  These  arguments  will  not  be 
strong  enough  to  prevail  against  one  of  the  most 
powerful  and  capricious  of  all  habits.  This 
habit  must  be  met  and  conquered  (and  it  can 
be!)  by  an  even  more  powerful- quality  in  the 
human  mind;  I  mean  the  universal  human  hor- 
ror of  looking  ridiculous.  The  man  who  loses 
his  temper  often  thinks  he  is  doing  something 
rather  fine  and  majestic.  On  the  contrary,  so 


70  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

far  is  this  from  being  the  fact,  he  is  merely 
making  an  ass  of  himself.  He  is  merely  parading 
himself  as  an  undignified  fool,  as  that  supremely 
contemptible  figure  —  a  grown-up  baby.  He 
may  intimidate  a  feeble  companion  by  his  raging, 
or  by  the  dark  sullenness  of  a  more  subdued 
flame,  but  in  the  heart  of  even  the  weakest  com- 
panion is  a  bedrock  feeling  of  contempt  for  him. 
The  way  in  which  a  man  of  uncertain  temper  is 
treated  by  his  friends  proves  that  they  despise 
him,  for  they  do  not  treat  him  as  a  reasonable 
being.  How  should  they  treat  him  as  a  reason- 
able being  when  the  tenure  of  his  reason  is  so 
insecure?  And  if  only  he  could  hear  what  is 
said  of  him  behind  his  back!  .  .  . 

The  invalid  can  cure  himself  by  teaching  his 
brain  the  habit  of  dwelling  upon  his  extreme 
fatuity.  Let  him  concentrate  regularly,  with 
intense  fixation,  upon  the  ideas :  "  When  I  lose 
my  temper,  when  I  get  ruffled,  when  that  mys- 
terious vibration  runs  through  me,  I  am  making 
a  donkey  of  myself,  a  donkey,  and  .  a  donkey ! 
You  understand,  a  preposterous  donkey!  I  am 
behaving  like  a  great  baby.  I  look  a  fool.  I  am 
a  spectacle  bereft  of  dignity.  Everybody  de- 
spises me,  smiles  at  me  in  secret,  disdains  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  71 

idiotic    ass    with    whom    it    is    impossible    to 
reason." 

Ordinarily  the  invalid  disguises  from  himself 
this  aspect  of  his  disease,  and  his  brain  will  in- 
stinctively avoid  it  as  much  as  it  can.  But  in 
hours  of  calm  he  can  slowly  and  regularly  force 
his  brain,  by  the  practice  of  concentration,  to 
familiarise  itself  with  just  this  aspect,  so  that  in 
time  its  instinct  will  be  to  think  first,  and  not 
last,  of  just  this  aspect.  When  he  has  arrived 
at  that  point  he  is  saved.  No  man  who,  at  the 
very  inception  of  the  fire,  is  visited  with  a  clear 
vision  of  himself  as  an  arrant  ass  and  pitiable 
object  of  contempt,  will  lack  the  volition  to  put 
the  fire  out.  But,  be  it  noted,  he  will  not  succeed 
until  he  can  do  it  at  once.  A  fire  is  a  fire,  and 
the  engines  must  gallop  by  themselves  out  of  the 
station  instantly.  This  means  the  acquirement 
of  a  mental  habit.  During  the  preliminary  stages 
of  the  cure  he  should,  of  course,  avoid  inflam- 
mable situations.  This  is  a  perfectly  simple  thing 
to  do,  if  the  brain  has  been  disciplined  out  of  its 
natural  forgetfulness. 


MISCHIEVOUSLY  OVERWORK- 
ING IT 

I  HAVE  dealt  with  the  two  general  major 
causes  of  friction  in  the  daily  use  of  the 
machine.  I  will  now  deal  with  a  minor 
cause,  and  make  an  end  of  mere  dailiness.  This 
minor  cause  —  and  after  all  I  do  not  know  that 
its  results  are  so  trifling  as  to  justify  the  epithet 
"  minor  "  —  is  the  straining  of  the  machine  by 
forcing  it  to  do  work  which  it  was  never  intended 
to  do.  Although  we  are  incapable  of  persuading 
our  machines  to  do  effectively  that  which  they 
xare  bound  to  do  somehow,  we  continually  over- 
burden them  with  entirely  unnecessary  and  inept 
tasks.  We  cannot,  it  would  seem,  let  things 
alone. 

For  example,  in  the  ordinary  household  the 
amount  of  machine  horse-power  expended  in 
fighting  for  the  truth  is  really  quite  absurd.  This 
pure  zeal  for  the  establishment  and  general  ad- 
mission of  the  truth  is  usually  termed  "  contra- 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  73 

dictoriness."  But,  of  course,  it  is  not  that;  it  is 
something  higher.  My  wife  states  that  the 
Joneses  have  gone  into  a  new  flat,  of  which  the 
rent  is  £165  a  year.  Now,  Jones  has  told  me 
personally  that  the  rent  of  his  new  flat  is  £156 
a  year.  I  correct  my  wife.  Knowing  that  she 
is  in  the  right,  she  corrects  me.  She  cannot  bear 
that  a  falsehood  should  prevail.  It  is  not  a  ques- 
tion of  £9,  it  is  a  question  of  truth.  Her  en- 
thusiasm for  truth  excites  my  enthusiasm  for 
truth.  Five  minutes  ago  I  did  n't  care  twopence 
whether  the  rent  of  the  Joneses'  new  flat  was 
£165  or  £156  or  £1,056  a  year.  But  now  I 
care  intensely  that  it  is  £156.  I  have  formed 
myself  into  a  select  society  for  the  propagating 
of  the  truth  about  the  rent  of  the  Joneses'  new 
flat,  and  my  wife  has  done  the  same.  In  elo- 
quence, in  argumentative  skill,  in  strict  super- 
vision of  our  tempers,  we  each  of  us  squander 
enormous  quantities  of  that  h.-p.  which  is  so 
precious  to  us.  And  the  net  effect  is  naught. 

Now,  if  one  of  us  two  had  understood  the  ele- 
mentary principles  of  human  engineering,  that 
one  would  have  said  (privately) :  "  Truth  is  in- 
destructible. Truth  will  out.  Truth  is  never  in 
a  hurry.  If  it  doesn't  come  out  to-day  it  will 


74  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

come  out  to-morrow  or  next  year.  It  can  take 
care  of  itself.  Ultimately  my  wife  (or  my  hus- 
band) will  learn  the  essential  cosmic  truth  about 
the  rent  of  the  Joneses'  new  flat.  I  already  know 
it,  and  the  moment  when  she  (or  he)  knows  it 
also  will  be  the  moment  of  my  triumph.  She 
(or  he)  will  not  celebrate  my  triumph  openly, 
but  it  will  be  none  the  less  real.  And  my  reputa- 
tion for  accuracy  and  calm  restraint  will  be  con- 
solidated. If,  by  a  rare  mischance,  I  am  in 
error,  it  will  be  vastly  better  for  me  in  the  day 
of  my  undoing  that  I  have  not  been  too  positive 
now.  Besides,  nobody  has  appointed  me  sole 
custodian  of  the  great  truth  concerning  the  rent 
of  the  Joneses'  new  flat.  I  was  not  brought  into 
the  world  to  be  a  safe-deposit,  and  more  urgent 
matters  summon  me  to  effort."  If  one  of  us  had 
meditated  thus,  much  needless  friction  would 
have  been  avoided  and  power  saved;  amour- 
propre  would  not  have  been  exposed  to  risks; 
the  sacred  cause  of  truth  would  not  in  the  least 
have  suffered;  and  the  rent  of  the  Joneses'  new 
flat  would  anyhow  have  remained  exactly  what 
it  is. 

In  addition  to  straining  the  machine  by  our 
excessive  anxiety  for  the  spread  of  truth,  we  give 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  75 

a  very  great  deal  too  much  attention  to  the 
state  of  other  people's  machines.  I  cannot  too 
strongly,  too  sarcastically,  deprecate  this  aston- 
ishing habit.  It  will  be  found  to  be  rife  in  nearly 
every  household  and  in  nearly  every  office.  We 
are  most  of  us  endeavouring  to  rearrange  the 
mechanism  in  other  heads  than  our  own.  This 
is  always  dangerous  and  generally  futile.  Con- 
sidering the  difficulty  we  have  in  our  own  brains, 
where  our  efforts  are  sure  of  being  accepted  as 
well-meant,  and  where  we  have  at  any  rate  a 
rough  notion  of  the  machine's  construction,  our 
intrepidity  in  adventuring  among  the  delicate 
adjustments  of  other  brains  is  remarkable.  We 
are  cursed  by  too  much  of  the  missionary  spirit. 
We  must  needs  voyage  into  the  China  of  our 
brother's  brain,  and  explain  there  that  things  are 
seriously  wrong  in  that  heathen  land,  and  make 
ourselves  unpleasant  in  the  hope  of  getting  them 
put  right.  We  have  all  our  own  brain  and  body 
on  which  to  wreak  our  personality,  but  this  is 
not  enough;  we  must  extend  our  personality 
further,  just  as  though  we  were  a  colonising 
world-power  intoxicated  by  the  idea  of  the 
"  white  man's  burden." 

One  of  the  central  secrets  of  efficient  daily 


76  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

living  is  to  leave  our  daily  companions  alone  a 
great  deal  more  than  we  do,  and  attend  to  our- 
selves. If  a  daily  companion  is  conducting  his 
life  upon  principles  which  you  know  to  be  false, 
and  with  results  which  you  feel  to  be  unpleasant, 
the  safe  rule  is  to  keep  your  mouth  shut.  Or  if, 
out  of  your  singular  conceit,  you  are  compelled 
to  open  it,  open  it  with  all  precautions,  and  with 
the  formal  politeness  you  would  use  to  a  stranger. 
Intimacy  is  no  excuse  for  rough  manners,  though 
the  majority  of  us  seem  to  think  it  is.  You  are 
not  in  charge  of  the  universe ;  you  are  in  charge 
of  yourself.  You  cannot  hope  to  manage  the 
universe  in  your  spare  time,  and  if  you  try  you 
will  probably  make  a  mess  of  such  part  of  the 
universe  as  you  touch,  while  gravely  neglecting 
yourself.  In  every  family  there  is  generally 
someone  whose  meddlesome  interest  in  other 
machines  leads  to  serious  friction  in  his  own. 
Criticise  less,  even  in  the  secrecy  of  your  cham- 
ber. And  do  not  blame  at  all.  Accept  your 
environment  and  adapt  yourself  to  it  in  silence, 
instead  of  noisily  attempting  to  adapt  your  en- 
vironment to  yourself.  Here  is  true  wisdom. 
You  have  no  business  trespassing  beyond  the 
confines  of  your  own  individuality.  In  so  tres- 


THE    HUMAN   MACHINE  77 

passing  you  are  guilty  of  impertinence.  This  is 
obvious.  And  yet  one  of  the  chief  activities  of 
home-life  consists  in  prancing  about  at  random 
on  other  people's  private  lawns.  What  I  say 
applies  even  to  the  relations  between  parents  and 
children.  And  though  my  precept  is  exaggerated, 
it  is  purposely  exaggerated  in  order  effectively 
to  balance  the  exaggeration  in  the  opposite 
direction. 

All  individualities,  other  than  one's  own,  are 
part  of  one's  environment.  The  evolutionary 
process  is  going  on  all  right,  and  they  are  a  por- 
tion of  it.  Treat  them  as  inevitable.  To  assert 
that  they  are  inevitable  is  not  to  assert  that  they 
are  unalterable.  Only  the  alteration  of  them  is 
not  primarily  your  affair;  it  is  theirs.  Your 
affair  is  to  use  them,  as  they  are,  without 
self-righteousness,  blame,  or  complaint,  for  the 
smooth  furtherance  of  your  own  ends.  There  is 
no  intention  here  to  rob  them  of  responsibility 
by  depriving  them  of  free-will  while  saddling 
you  with  responsibility  as  a  free  agent.  As  your 
environment  they  must  be  accepted  as  inevita- 
ble, because  they  are  inevitable.  But  as  centres 
themselves  they  have  their  own  responsibility: 
which  is  not  yours.  The  historic  question: 


78  THE   HUMAN   MACHINE 

"  Have  we  free-will,  or  are  we  the  puppets  of 
determinism?"  enters  now.  As  a  question  it  is 
fascinating  and  futile.  It  has  never  been,  and  it 
never  will  be,  settled.  The  theory  of  determin- 
ism cannot  be  demolished  by  argument.  But  in 
his  heart  every  man,  including  the  most  obstinate 
supporter  of  the  theory,  demolishes  it  every  hour 
of  every  day.  On  the  other  hand,  the  theory  of 
free-will  can  be  demolished  by  ratiocination!  So 
much  the  worse  for  ratiocination !  //  we  regard 
ourselves  as  free  agents,  and  the  personalities 
surrounding  us  as  the  puppets  of  determinism-, 
we  shall  have  arrived  at  the  working  compromise 
from  which  the  finest  results  of  living  can  be 
obtained.  The  philosophic  experience  of  cen- 
turies, if  it  has  proved  anything;,  has  proved  this. 
And  the  man  who  acts  upon  it  in  the  common, 
banal  contacts  and  collisions  of  the  difficult  ex- 
periment which  we  call  daily  life,  will  speedily 
become  convinced  of  it&  practical  worth. 


XI 

AN   INTERLUDE 

FOR  ten  chapters  you  have  stood  it,  but 
not  without  protest.  I  know  the  feeling 
which  is  in  your  minds,  and  which  has 
manifested  itself  in  numerous  criticisms  of  my 
ideas.  That  feeling  may  be  briefly  translated, 
perhaps,  thus :  "  This  is  all  very  well,  but  —  it 
is  n't  true,  not  a  bit !  It 's  only  a  fairy-tale  that 
you  have  been  telling  us.  Miracles  don't  hap- 
pen," etc.  I,  on  my  part,  have  a  feeling  that 
unless  I  take  your  feeling  in  hand  at  once,  and 
firmly  deal  with  it,  I  had  better  put  my  shutters 
up,  for  you  will  have  got  into  the  way  of  regard- 
ing me  simply  as  a  source  of  idle  amusement. 
Already  I  can  perceive,  from  the  expressions  of 
some  critics,  that,  so  far  as  they  are  concerned, 
I  might  just  as  well  not  have  written  a  word. 
Therefore  at  this  point  I  pause,  in  order  to  insist 
once  more  upon  what  I  began  by  saying. 

The   burden   of   your   criticism   is :    "  Human 
nature  is  always  the  same.     I  know  my  faults. 


8o  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

But  it  is  useless  to  tell  me  about  them.  I  can't 
alter  them.  I  was  born  like  that."  The  fata1 
weakness  of  this  argument  is,  first,  that  it  is 
based  on  a  complete  falsity;  and  second,  that  it 
puts  you  in  an  untenable  position.  Human  na- 
ture does  change.  Nothing  can  be  more  unscien- 
tific, more  hopelessly  mediaeval,  than  to  imagine 
that  it  does  not.  It  changes  like  everything  else. 
You  can't  see  it  change.  True!  But  then  you 
can't  see  the  grass  growing  —  not  unless  you 
arise  very  early. 

Is  human  nature  the  same  now  as  in  the  days 
of  Babylonian  civilisation,  when  the  social  ma- 
chine was  oiled  by  drenchings  of  blood?  Is  it 
the  same  now  as  in  the  days  of  Greek  civilisation, 
when  there  was  no  such  thing  as  romantic  love 
between  the  sexes?  Is  it  the  same  now  as  it  was 
during  the  centuries  when  constant  friction  ha«* 
to  provide  its  own  cure  in  the  shape  of  constant 
war?  Is  it  the  same  now  as  it  was  on  March 
2nd,  1819,  when  the  British  Government  officially 
opposed  a  motion  to  consider  the  severity  of  the 
criminal  laws  (which  included  capital  punish- 
ment for  cutting  down  a  tree,  and  other  sensible 
dodges  against  friction),  and  were  defeated  by 
a  majority  of  only  nineteen  votes?  Is  it  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  81 

same  now  as  in  the  year  1883,  when  the  first 
S.P.C.C.  was  formed  in  England? 

If  you  consider  that  human  nature  is  still  the 
same,  you  should  instantly  go  out  and  make  a 
bonfire  of  the  works  of  Spencer,  Darwin,  and 
Wallace,  and  then  return  to  enjoy  the  purely  joc- 
ular side  of  the  present  volume.  If  you  admit 
that  it  has  changed,  let  me  ask  you  how  it  has 
changed,  unless  by  the  continual  infinitesimal 
efforts,  upon  themselves,  of  individual  men,  like 
you  and  me.  Did  you  suppose  it  was  changed 
by  magic,  or  by  acts  of  parliament,  or  by  the 
action  of  groups  on  persons,  and  not  of  persons 
on  groups?  Let  me  tell  you  that  human  nature 
has  changed  since  yesterday.  Let  me  tell  you 
that  to-day  reason  has  a  more  powerful  voice  in 
the  directing  of  instinct  than  it  had  yesterday. 
Let  me  tell  you  that  to-day  the  friction  of  the 
machines  is  less  screechy  and  grinding  than  it 
was  yesterday. 

"  You  were  born  like  that,  and  you  can't  alter 
yourself,  and  so  it 's  no  use  talking."  If  you 
really  believe  this,  why  make  any  effort  at  all? 
Why  not  let  the  whole  business  beautifully  slide 
and  yield  to  your  instincts?  What  object  can 
there  be  in  trying  to  control  yourself  in  any 


82  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

manner  whatever  if  you  are  unalterable?  Assert 
yourself  to  be  unalterable,  and  you  assert  your- 
self a  fatalist.  Assert  yourself  a  fatalist,  and  you 
free  yourself  from  all  moral  responsibility  —  and 
other  people,  too.  Well,  then,  act  up  to  your 
convictions,  if  convictions  they  are.  If  you  can't 
alter  yourself,  I  can't  alter  myself,  and  supposing 
that  I  come  along  and  bash  you  on  the  head  and 
steal  your  purse,  you  can't  blame  me.  You  can 
only,  on  recovering  consciousness,  affectionately 
grasp  my  hand  and  murmur :  "  Don't  apologise, 
my  dear  fellow;  we  can't  alter  ourselves." 

This,  you  say,  is  absurd.  It  is.  That  is  one 
of  my  innumerable  points.  The  truth  is,  you  do 
not  really  believe  that  you  cannot  alter  yourself. 
What  is  the  matter  with  you  is  just  what  is  the 
matter  with  me  —  sheer  idleness.  You  hate  get- 
ting up  in  the  morning,  and  to  excuse  your  inex- 
cusable indolence  you  talk  big  about  Fate.  Just 
as  "  patriotism  is  the  last  refuge  of  a  scoundrel," 
so  fatalism  is  the  last  refuge  of  a  shirker.  But 
you  deceive  no  one,  least  of  all  yourself.  You 
have  not,  rationally,  a  leg  to  stand  on.  At  this 
juncture,  because  I  have  made  you  laugh,  you 
consent  to  say :  "  I  do  try,  all  I  can.  But  I  can 
only  alter  myself  a  very  little.  By  constitution 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  83 

I  am  mentally  idle.  I  can't  help  that,  can  I?" 
Well,  so  long  as  you  are  not  the  only  absolutely 
unchangeable  thing  in  a  universe  of  change,  I 
don't  mind.  It  is  something  for  you  to  admit 
that  you  can  alter  yourself  even  a  very  little. 
The  difference  between  our  philosophies  is  now 
only  a  question  of  degree. 

In  the  application  of  any  system  of  perfecting 
the  machine,  no  two  persons  will  succeed  equally. 
From  the  disappointed  tone  of  some  of  your 
criticisms  it  might  be  fancied  that  I  had  adver- 
tised a  system  for  making  archangels  out  of 
tailor's  dummies.  Such  was  not  my  hope.  I 
have  no  belief  in  miracles.  But  I  know  that 
when  a  thing  is  thoroughly  well  done  it  often  has 
the  air  of  being  a  miracle.  My  sole  aim  is  to  in- 
sist that  every  man  shall  perfect  his  machine  to 
the  best  of  his  powers,  not  to  the  best  of  some- 
body else's  powers.  I  do  not  indulge  in  any  hope 
that  a  man  can  be  better  than  his  best  self.  I  am, 
however,  convinced  that  every  man  fails  to  be 
his  best  self  a  great  deal  oftener  than  he  need 
fail  —  for  the  reason  that  his  will-power,  be  it 
great  or  small,  is  not  directed  according  to  the 
principles  of  common  sense. 

Common  sense  will  surely  lead  a  man  to  ask 


84  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

the  question :  "  Why  did  my  actions  yesterday 
contradict  my  reason?  "  The  reply  to  this  ques- 
tion will  nearly  always  be :  "  Because  at  the 
critical  moment  I  forgot."  The  supreme  expla- 
nation of  the  abortive  results  of  so  many  efforts 
at  self-alteration,  the  supreme  explanation  of  our 
frequent  miserable  scurrying  into  a  doctrine  of 
fatalism,  is  simple  forgetfulness.  It  is  not  force 
that  we  lack,  but  the  skill  to  remember  exactly 
what  our  reason  would  have  us  do  or  think  at 
the  moment  itself.  How  is  this  skill  to  be  ac- 
quired? It  can  only  be  acquired,  as  skill  at 
games  is  acquired,  by  practice;  by  the  training 
of  the  organ  involved  to  such  a  point  that  the 
organ  acts  rightly  by  instinct  instead  of  wrongly 
by  instinct.  There  are  degrees  of  success  in  this 
procedure,  but  there  is  no  such  phenomenon  as 
complete  failure. 

Habits  which  increase  friction  can  be  replaced 
by  habits  which  lessen  friction.  Habits  which 
arrest  development  can  be  replaced  by  habits 
which  encourage  development.  And  as  a  habit 
is  formed  naturally,  so  it  can  be  formed  artifi- 
cially, by  imitation  of  the  unconscious  process, 
by  accustoming  the  brain  to  the  new  idea.  Let 
me,  as  an  example,  refer  again  to  the  minor  sub- 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  85 

ject  of  daily  friction,  and,  within  that  subject, 
to  the  influence  of  tone.  A  man  employs  a  fric- 
tional  tone  through  habit.  The  frictional  tone 
is  an  instinct  with  him.  But  if  he  had  a  quarter 
of  an  hour  to  reflect  before  speaking,  and  if  dur- 
ing that  quarter  of  an  hour  he  could  always  listen 
to  arguments  against  the  frictional  tone,  his  use 
of  the  frictional  tone  would  rapidly  diminish; 
his  reason  would  conquer  his  instinct.  As  things 
are,  his  instinct  conquers  his  reason  by  a  surprise 
attack,  by  taking  it  unawares.  Regular  daily 
concentration  of  the  brain,  for  a  certain  period, 
upon  the  non-frictional  tone,  and  the  immense 
advantages  of  its  use,  will  gradually  set  up  in  the 
brain  a  new  habit  of  thinking  about  the  non- 
frictional  tone;  until  at  length  the  brain,  disci- 
plined, turns  to  the  correct  act  before  the  old, 
silly  instinct  can  capture  it;  and  ultimately  a 
new  sagacious  instinct  will  supplant  the  old 
one. 

This  is  the  rationale.  It  applies  to  all  habits. 
Any  person  can  test  its  efficiency  in  any  habit. 
I  care  not  whether  he  be  of  strong  or  weak  will 
—  he  can  test  it.  He  will  soon  see  the  tremen- 
dous difference  between  merely  "  making  a  good 
resolution "  —  (he  has  been  doing  that  all  his 


86  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

life  without  any  very  brilliant  consequences)  — 
and  concentrating  the  brain  for  a  given  time  ex- 
clusively upon  a  good  resolution.  Concentra- 
tion, the  efficient  mastery  of  the  brain  —  all  is 
there! 


XII 
AN   INTEREST  IN   LIFE 

A~TER  a  certain  period  of  mental  discipline, 
of  deliberate  habit-forming  and  habit- 
breaking,  such  as  I  have  been  indicating, 
a  man  will  begin  to  acquire  at  any  rate  a  super- 
ficial knowledge,  a  nodding  acquaintance,  with 
that  wonderful  and  mysterious  affair,  his  brain, 
and  he  will  also  begin  to  perceive  how  important 
a  factor  in  daily  life  is  the  control  of  his  brain. 
He  will  assuredly  be  surprised  at  the  miracles 
which  lie  between  his  collar  and  his  hat,  in  that 
queer  box  that  he  calls  his  head.  For  the  effects 
that  can  be  accomplished  by  mere  steady,  per- 
sistent thinking  must  appear  to  be  miracles  to 
apprentices  in  the  practice  of  thought.  When 
once  a  man,  having  passed  an  unhappy  day  be- 
cause his  clumsy,  negligent  brain  forgot  to  con- 
trol his  instincts  at  a  critical  moment,  has  said 
to  his  brain :  "  I  will  force  you,  by  concentrating 
you  on  that  particular  point,  to  act  efficiently  the 
next  time  similar  circumstances  arise,"  and  when 


88  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

he  has  carried  out  his  intention,  and  when  the 
awkward  circumstances  have  recurred,  and  his 
brain,  disciplined,  has  done  its  work,  and  so  pre- 
vented unhappiness  —  then  that  man  will  regard 
his  brain  with  a  new  eye.  "  By  Jove !  "  he  will 
say ;  "  I  Ve  stopped  one  source  of  unhappiness, 
anyway.  There  was  a  time  when  I  should  have 
made  a  fool  of  myself  in  a  little  domestic  crisis 
such  as  to-day's.  But  I  have  gone  safely  through 
it.  I  am  all  right.  She  is  all  right.  The  atmo- 
sphere is  not  dangerous  with  undischarged  elec- 
tricity! And  all  because  my  brain,  being  in 
proper  condition,  watched  firmly  over  my  in- 
stincts !  I  must  keep  this  up."  He  will  peer  into 
that  brain  more  and  more.  He  will  see  more 
and  more  of  its  possibilities.  He  will  have  a  new 
and  a  supreme  interest  in  life.  A  garden  is  a 
fairly  interesting  thing.  But  the  cultivation  of 
a  garden  is  as  dull  as  cold  mutton  compared  to 
the  cultivation  of  a  brain ;  and  wet  weather  won't 
interfere  with  digging,  planting,  and  pruning  in 
the  box. 

In  due  season  the  man  whose  hobby  is  his 
brain  will  gradually  settle  down  into  a  daily 
routine,  with  which  routine  he  will  start  the 
day.  The  idea  at  the  back  of  the  mind  of  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  89 

ordinary  man  (by  the  ordinary  man  I  mean  the 
man  whose  brain  is  not  his  hobby)  is  almost 
always  this :  "  There  are  several  things  at  pres- 
ent hanging  over  me  —  worries,  unfulfilled  am- 
bitions, unrealised  desires.  As  soon  as  these 
things  are  definitely  settled,  then  I  shall  begin 
to  live  and  enjoy  myself."  That  is  the  ordinary 
man's  usual  idea.  He  has  it  from  his  youth  to 
his  old  age.  He  is  invariably  waiting  for  some- 
thing to  happen  before  he  really  begins  to  live. 
I  am  sure  that  if  you  are  an  ordinary  man  (of 
course,  you  are  n't,  I  know)  you  will  admit  that 
this  is  true  of  you;  you  exist  in  the  hope  that 
one  day  things  will  be  sufficiently  smoothed  out 
for  you  to  begin  to  live.  That  is  just  where  you 
differ  from  the  man  whose  brain  is  his  hobby. 
His  daily  routine  consists  in  a  meditation  in  the 
following  vein :  "  This  day  is  before  me.  The 
circumstances  of  this  day  are  my  environment; 
they  are  the  material  out  of  which,  by  means  of 
my  brain,  I  have  to  live  and  be  happy  and  to 
refrain  from  causing  unhappiness  in  other  people. 
It  is  the  business  of  my  brain  to  make  use  of 
this  material.  My  brain  is  in  its  box  for  that 
sole  purpose.  Not  to-morrow!  Not  next  year! 
Not  when  I  have  made  my  fortune!  Not  when 


go  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

my  sick  child  is  out  of  danger !  Not  when  my  wife 
has  returned  to  her  senses !  Not  when  my  salary 
is  raised!  Not  when  I  have  passed  that  exami- 
nation! Not  when  my  indigestion  is  better! 
But  now  I  To-day,  exactly  as  to-day  is!  The 
facts  of  to-day,  which  in  my  unregeneracy  I 
regarded  primarily  as  anxieties,  nuisances,  im- 
pediments, I  now  regard  as  so  much  raw  material 
from  which  my  brain  has  to  weave  a  tissue  of 
life  that  is  comely." 

And  then  he  foresees  the  day  as  well  as  he 
can.  His  experience  teaches  him  where  he  will 
have  difficulty,  and  he  administers  to  his  brain 
the  lessons  of  which  it  will  have  most  need.  He 
carefully  looks  the  machine  over,  and  arranges 
it  specially  for  the  sort  of  road  which  he  knows 
that  it  will  have  to  traverse.  And  especially  he 
readjusts  his  point  of  view,  for  his  point  of  view 
is  continually  getting  wrong.  He  is  continually 
seeing  worries  where  he  ought  to  see  material. 
He  may  notice,  for  instance,  a  patch  on  the  back 
of  his  head,  and  he  wonders  whether  it  is  the 
result  of  age  or  of  disease,  or  whether  it  has 
always  been  there.  And  his  wife  tells  him  he 
must  call  at  the  chemist's  and  satisfy  himself  at 
once.  Frightful  nuisance!  Age!  The  endless 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  91 

trouble  of  a  capillary  complaint!  Calling  at  the 
chemist's  will  make  him  late  at  the  office!  etc., 
etc.  But  then  his  skilled,  efficient  brain  inter- 
venes :  "  What  peculiarly  interesting  material 
this  mean  and  petty  circumstance  yields  for  the 
practice  of  philosophy  and  right  living !  "  And 
again:  "Is  this  to  ruffle  you,  O  my  soul?  Will 
it  serve  any  end  whatever  that  I  should  buzz 
nervously  round  this  circumstance  instead  of 
attending  to  my  usual  business?  " 

I  give  this  as  an  example  of  the  necessity  of 
adjusting  the  point  of  view,  and  of  the  manner 
in  which  a  brain  habituated  by  suitable  concen- 
tration to  correct  thinking  will  come  to  the  rescue 
in  unexpected  contingencies.  Naturally  it  will 
work  with  greater  certainty  in  the  manipulation 
of  difficulties  that  are  expected,  that  can  be  "  seen 
coming  " ;  and  preparation  for  the  expected  is, 
fortunately,  preparation  for  the  unexpected.  The 
man  who  commences  his  day  by  a  steady  con- 
templation of  the  dangers  which  the  next  sixteen 
hours  are  likely  to  furnish,  and  by  arming  him- 
self specially  against  those  dangers,  has  thereby 
armed  himself,  though  to  a  less  extent,  against 
dangers  which  he  did  not  dream  of.  But  the 
routine  must  be  fairly  elastic.  It  may  be  neces- 


92  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

sary  to  commence  several  days  in  succession  — 
for  a  week  or  for  months,  even  —  with  disciplin- 
ing the  brain  in  one  particular  detail,  to  the  tem- 
porary neglect  of  other  matters.  It  is  astonish- 
ing how  you  can  weed  every  inch  of  a  garden 
path  and  keep  it  in  the  most  meticulous  order, 
and  then  one  morning  find  in  the  very  middle  of 
it  a  lusty,  full-grown  plant  whose  roots  are  posi- 
tively mortised  in  granite!  All  gardeners  are 
familiar  with  such  discoveries. 

But  a  similar  discovery,  though  it  entails  hard 
labour  on  him,  will  not  disgust  the  man  whose 
hobby  is  his  brain.  For  the  discovery  in  itself 
is  part  of  the  material  out  of  which  he  has  to 
live.  If  a  man  is  to  turn  everything  whatsoever 
into  his  own  calm,  dignity,  and  happiness,  he 
must  make  this  use  even  of  his  own  failures. 
He  must  look  at  them  as  phenomena  of  the  brain 
in  that  box,  and  cheerfully  set  about  taking  meas- 
ures to  prevent  their  repetition.  All  that  happens 
to  him,  success  or  check,  will  but  serve  to  in- 
crease his  interest  in  the  contents  of  that  box. 
I  seem  to  hear  you  saying :  "  And  a  fine  egotist 
he  ?11  be!  "  Well,  he  '11  be  the  right  sort  of  ego- 
tist. The  average  man  is  not  half  enough  of  an 
egotist.  If  egotism  means  a  terrific  interest  in 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  93 

one's  self,  egotism  is  absolutely  essential  to  effi- 
cient living.  There  is  no  getting  away  from  that. 
But  if  egotism  means  selfishness,  the  serious  stu- 
dent of  the  craft  of  daily  living  will  not  be  an 
egotist  for  more  than  about  a  year.  In  a  year 
he  will  have  proved  the  ineptitude  of  egotism. 


XIII 
SUCCESS  AND   FAILURE 

1AM  sadly  aware  that  these  brief  chapters 
will  be  apt  to  convey,  especially  to  the 
trustful  and  enthusiastic  reader,  a  false  im- 
pression; the  impression  of  simplicity;  and  that 
when  experience  has  roughly  corrected  this  im- 
pression, the  said  reader,  unless  he  is  most  sol- 
emnly warned,  may  abandon  the  entire  enter- 
prise in  a  fit  of  disgust,  and  for  ever  afterwards 
maintain  a  cynical  and  impolite  attitude  towards 
all  theories  of  controlling  the  human  machine. 
Now,  the  enterprise  is  not  a  simple  one.  It  is 
based  on  one  simple  principle  —  the  conscious 
discipline  of  the  brain  by  selected  habits  of 
thought  —  but  it  is  just  about  as  complicated  as 
anything  well  could  be.  Advanced  golf  is  child's 
play  compared  to  it.  The  man  who  briefly  says 
to  himself :  "  I  will  get  up  at  8,  and  from  8.30 
to  9  I  will  examine  and  control  my  brain,  and  so 
my  life  will  at  once  be  instantly  improved  out 
of  recognition  "  —  that  man  is  destined  to  un- 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  95 

pleasant  surprises.  Progress  will  be  slow.  Prog- 
ress may  appear  to  be  quite  rapid  at  first,  and 
then  a  period  of  futility  may  set  in,  and  the 
would-be  vanquisher  of  his  brain  may  suffer  a 
series  of  the  most  deadly  defeats.  And  in  his 
pessimism  he  may  imagine  that  all  his  pains  have 
gone  for  nothing,  and  that  the  unserious  loung- 
ers in  exhibition  gardens  and  readers  of  novels 
in  parlours  are  in  the  right  of  it  after  all. 
He  may  even  feel  rather  ashamed  of  himself 
for  having  been,  as  he  thinks,  taken  in  by  spe- 
cious promises,  like  the  purchaser  of  a  quack 
medicine. 

The  conviction  that  great  effort  has  been  made 
and  no  progress  achieved  is  the  chief  of  the 
dangers  that  affront  the  beginner  in  machine- 
tending.  It  is,  I  will  assert  positively,  in  every 
case  a  conviction  unjustified  by  the  facts,  and 
usually  it  is  the  mere  result  of  reaction  after 
fatigue,  encouraged  by  the  instinct  for  laziness. 
I  do  not  think  it  will  survive  an  impartial  ex- 
amination; but  I  know  that  a  man,  in  order  to 
find  an  excuse  for  abandoning  further  effort,  is 
capable  of  convincing  himself  that  past  effort  has 
yielded  no  fruit  at  all.  So  curious  is  the  human 
machine.  I  beg  every  student  of  himself  to  con- 


g6  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

sider  this  remark  with  all  the  intellectual  honesty 
at  his  disposal.  It  is  a  grave  warning. 

When  the  machine-tender  observes  that  he  is 
frequently  changing  his  point  of  view;  when  he 
notices  that  what  he  regarded  as  the  kernel  of 
the  difficulty  yesterday  has  sunk  to  a  triviality 
to-day,  being  replaced  by  a  fresh  phenomenon; 
when  he  arises  one  morning  and  by  means  of  a 
new,  unexpected  glimpse  into  the  recesses  of  the 
machine  perceives  that  hitherto  he  has  been  quite 
wrong  and  must  begin  again;  when  he  wonders 
how  on  earth  he  could  have  been  so  blind  and  so 
stupid  as  not  to  see  what  now  he  sees ;  when  the 
new  vision  is  veiled  by  new  disappointments  and 
narrowed  by  continual  reservations;  when  he  is 
overwhelmed  by  the  complexity  of  his  under- 
taking—  then  let  him  enhearten  himself,  for  he 
is  succeeding.  The  history  of  success  in  any  art 
—  and  machine-tending  is  an  art  —  is  a  history 
of  recommencements,  of  the  dispersal  and  re- 
forming of  doubts,  of  an  ever-increasing  concep- 
tion of  the  extent  of  the  territory  unconquered, 
and  an  ever-decreasing  conception  of  the  extent 
of  the  territory  conquered. 

It  is  remarkable  that,  though  no  enterprise 
could  possibly  present  more  diverse  and  change- 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  97 

ful  excitements  than  the  mastering  of  the  brain, 
the  second  great  danger  which  threatens  its  ulti- 
mate success  is  nothing  but  a  mere  drying-up  of 
enthusiasm  for  it!  One  would  have  thought 
that  in  an  affair  which  concerned  him  so  nearly, 
in  an  affair  whose  results  might  be  in  a, very 
strict  sense  vital  to  him,  in  an  affair  upon  which 
his  happiness  and  misery  might  certainly  turn, 
a  man  would  not  weary  from  sheer  tedium. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  so.  Again  and  again  I  have 
noticed  the  abandonment,  temporary  or  perma- 
nent, of  this  mighty  and  thrilling  enterprise  from 
simple  lack  of  interest.  And  I  imagine  that,  in 
practically  all  cases  save  those  in  which  an  excep- 
tional original  force  of  will  renders  the  enterprise 
scarcely  necessary,  the  interest  in  it  will  languish 
unless  it  is  regularly  nourished  from  without. 
Now,  the  interest  in  it  cannot  be  nourished  from 
without  by  means  of  conversation  with  other 
brain-tamers.  There  are  certain  things  which 
may  not  be  discussed  by  sanely  organised  people ; 
and  this  is  one.  The  affair  is  too  intimate,  and 
it  is  also  too  moral.  Even  after  only  a  few  min- 
utes' vocalisation  on  this  subject  a  deadly  infec- 
tion seems  to  creep  into  the  air  —  the  infection 
of  priggishness.  (Or  am  I  mistaken,  and  do  I 


98  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

fancy  this  horror?     No;    I  cannot  believe  that 
I  am  mistaken.) 

Hence  the  nourishment  must  be  obtained  by 
reading;  a  little  reading  every  day.  I  suppose 
there  are  some  thousands  of  authors  who  have 
written  with  more  or  less  sincerity  on  the  man- 
agement of  the  human  machine.  But  the  two 
which,  for  me,  stand  out  easily  above  all  the 
rest  are  Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus  and  Epicte- 
tus.  Not  much  has  been  discovered  since  their 
time.  "  The  perfecting  of  life  is  a  power  resid- 
ing in  the  soul,"  wrote  Marcus  Aurelius  in  the 
ninth  book  of  "  To  Himself,"  over  seventeen  hun- 
dred years  ago.  Marcus  Aurelius  is  assuredly 
regarded  as  the  greatest  of  writers  in  the  human 
machine  school,  and  not  to  read  him  daily  is  con- 
sidered by  many  to  be  a  bad  habit.  As  a  con- 
fession his  work  stands  alone.  But  as  a  practical 
"  Bradshaw  "  of  existence,  I  would  put  the  dis- 
courses of  Epictetus  before  M.  Aurelius.  Epicte- 
tus  is  grosser;  he  will  call  you  a  blockhead  as 
soon  as  look  at  you;  he  is  witty,  he  is  even 
humorous,  and  he  never  wanders  far  away  from 
the  incidents  of  daily  life.  He  is  brimming  over 
with  actuality  for  readers  of  the  year  1908.  He 
was  a  freed  slave.  M.  Aurelius  was  an  Emperor, 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  99 

and  he  had  the  morbidity  from  which  all  em- 
perors must  suffer.  A  finer  soul  than  Epictetus, 
he  is  not,  in  my  view,  so  useful  a  companion. 
Not  all  of  us  can  breathe  freely  in  his  atmo- 
sphere. Nevertheless,  he  is  of  course  to  be  read, 
and  re-read  continually.  When  you  have  gone 
through  Epictetus  —  a  single  page  or  paragraph 
per  day,  well  masticated  and  digested,  suffices  — 
you  can  go  through  M.  Aurelius,  and  then  you 
can  return  to  Epictetus,  and  so  on,  morning  by 
morning,  or  night  by  night,  till  your  life's  end. 
And  they  will  conserve  your  interest  in  yourself. 
In  the  matter  of  concentration,  I  hesitate  to 
recommend  Mrs.  Annie  Besant's  "  Thought 
Power,"  and  yet  I  should  be  possibly  unjust  if 
I  did  not  recommend  it,  having  regard  to  its 
immense  influence  on  myself.  It  is  not  one  of 
the  best  books  of  this  astounding  woman.  It  is 
addressed  to  theosophists,  and  can  only  be  com- 
pletely understood  in  the  light  of  theosophistic 
doctrines.  (To  grasp  it  all  I  found  myself  obliged 
to  study  a  much  larger  work  dealing  with  the- 
osophy  as  a  whole.)  It  contains  an  appreciable 
quantity  of  what  strikes  me  as  feeble  sentimen- 
talism,  and  also  a  lot  of  sheer  dogma.  But  it  is 
the  least  unsatisfactory  manual  of  the  brain  that 


ioo  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

I  have  met  with.  And  if  the  profane  reader  ig- 
nores all  that  is  either  Greek  or  twaddle  to  him, 
there  will  yet  remain  for  his  advantage  a  vast 
amount  of  very  sound  information  and  advice. 
All  these  three  books  are  cheap. 


XIV 
A  MAN  AND  HIS  ENVIRONMENT 

I  NOW  come  to  an  entirely  different  aspect 
of  the  whole  subject.  Hitherto  I  have 
dealt  with  the  human  machine  as  a  con- 
trivance for  adapting  the  man  to  his  environ- 
ment. My  aim  has  been  to  show  how  much  de- 
pends on  the  machine  and  how  little  depends  on 
the  environment,  and  that  the  essential  business 
of  the  machine  is  to  utilise,  for  making  the  stuff 
of  life,  the  particular  environment  in  which  it 
happens  to  find  itself  —  and  no  other!  All  this, 
however,  does  not  imply  that  one  must  accept, 
fatalistically  and  permanently  and  passively, 
any  preposterous  environment  into  which  destiny 
has  chanced  to  throw  us.  If  we  carry  far  enough 
the  discipline  of  our  brains,  we  can,  no  doubt, 
arrive  at  surprisingly  good  results  in  no  matter 
what  environment.  But  it  would  not  be  "  right 
reason  "  to  expend  an  excessive  amount  of  will- 
power on  brain-discipline  when  a  slighter  effort 
in  a  different  direction  would  produce  conse- 


102  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

quences  more  felicitous.  A  man  whom  fate  had 
pitched  into  a  canal  might  accomplish  miracles 
in  the  way  of  rendering  himself  amphibian;  he 
might  stagger  the  world  by  the  spectacle  of  his 
philosophy  under  amazing  difficulties;  people 
might  pay  sixpence  a  head  to  come  and  see  him; 
but  he  would  be  less  of  a  nincompoop  if  he 
climbed  out  and  arranged  to  live  definitely  on  the 
bank. 

The  advantage  of  an  adequate  study  of  the 
control  of  the  machine,  such  as  I  have  outlined, 
is  that  it  enables  the  student  to  judge,  with  some 
certainty,  whether  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  his 
life  is  caused  by  a  disordered  machine  or  by  an 
environment  for  which  the  machine  is,  in  its 
fundamental  construction,  unsuitable.  It  does 
help  him  to  decide  justly  whether,  in  the  case  of 
a  grave  difference  between  them,  he,  or  the  rest 
of  the  universe,  is  in  the  wrong.  And  also,  if  he 
decides  that  he  is  not  in  the  wrong,  it  helps  him 
to  choose  a  new  environment,  or  to  modify  the 
old,  upon  some  scientific  principle.  The  vast 
majority  of  people  never  know,  with  any  pre- 
cision, why  they  are  dissatisfied  with  their  so- 
journ on  this  planet.  They  make  long  and 
fatiguing  excursions  in  search  of  precious  mate- 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  103 

rials  which  all  the  while  are  concealed  in  their 
own  breasts.  They  don't  know  what  they  want; 
they  only  know  that  they  want  something.  Or, 
if  they  contrive  to  settle  in  their  own  minds  what 
they  do  want,  a  hundred  to  one  the  obtaining  of 
it  will  leave  them  just  as  far  off  contentment  as 
they  were  at  the  beginning!  This  is  a  matter  of 
daily  observation:  that  people  are  frantically 
engaged  in  attempting  to  get  hold  of  things 
which,  by  universal  experience,  are  hideously  dis- 
appointing to  those  who  have  obtained  posses- 
sion of  them.  And  still  the  struggle  goes  on,  and 
probably  will  go  on.  All  because  brains  are  lying 
idle !  "  It  is  no  trifle  that  is  at  stake,"  said  Epic- 
tetus  as  to  the  question  of  control  of  instinct  by 
reason.  "It  means,  Are  you  in  yottr  senses  or 
are  you  not?"  In  this  significance,  indubitably 
the  vast  majority  of  people  are  not  in  their 
senses ;  otherwise  they  would  not  behave  as  they 
do,  so  vaguely,  so  happy-go-luckily,  so  blindly. 
But  the  man  whose  brain  is  in  working  order 
emphatically  is  in  his  senses. 

And  when  a  man,  by  means  of  the  efficiency 
of  his  brain,  has  put  his  reason  in  definite  com- 
mand over  his  instincts,  he  at  once  sees  things 
in  a  truer  perspective  than  was  before  possible, 


104  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

and  therefore  he  is  able  to  set  a  just  value  upon 
the  various  parts  which  go  to  make  up  his  en- 
vironment. If,  for  instance,  he  lives  in  London, 
and  is  aware  of  constant  friction,  he  will  be  led 
to  examine  the  claims  of  London  as  a  Mecca  for 
intelligent  persons.  He  may  say  to  himself: 
"  There  is  something  wrong,  and  the  seat  of 
trouble  is  not  in  the  machine.  London  compels 
me  to  tolerate  dirt,  darkness,  ugliness,  strain, 
tedious  daily  journeyings,  and  general  expen- 
siveness.  What  does  London  give  me  in  ex- 
change? "  And  he  may  decide  that,  as  London 
offers  him  nothing  special  in  exchange  except 
the  glamour  of  London  and  an  occasional  seat  at 
a  good  concert  or  a  bad  play,  he  may  get  a  better 
return  for  his  expenditure  of  brains,  nerves,  and 
money  in  the  provinces.  He  may  perceive,  with 
a  certain  French  novelist,  that  "  most  people  of 
truly  distinguished  mind  prefer  the  provinces." 
And  he  may  then  actually,  in  obedience  to  rea- 
son, quit  the  deceptions  of  London  with  a  tran- 
quil heart,  sure  of  his  diagnosis.  Whereas  a  man 
who  had  not  devoted  much  time  to  the  care  of 
his  mental  machinery  could  not  screw  himself 
up  to  the  step,  partly  from  lack  of  resolution,  and 
partly  because  he  had  never  examined  the  sources 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  105 

of  his  unhappiness.  A  man  who,  not  having  full 
control  of  his  machine,  is  consistently  dissatisfied 
with  his  existence,  is  like  a  man  who  is  being 
secretly  poisoned  and  cannot  decide  with  what  or 
by  whom.  And  so  he  has  no  middle  course  be- 
tween absolute  starvation  and  a  continuance  of 
poisoning. 

As  with  the  environment  of  place,  so  with  the 
environment  of  individuals.  Most  friction  be- 
tween individuals  is  avoidable  friction;  some- 
times, however,  friction  springs  from  such  deep 
causes  that  no  skill  in  the  machine  can  do  away 
with  it.  But  how  is  the  man  whose  brain  is  not 
in  command  of  his  existence  to  judge  whether  the 
unpleasantness  can  be  cured  or  not,  whether  it 
arises  in  himself  or  in  the  other?  He  simply  can- 
not judge.  Whereas  a  man  who  keeps  his  brain 
for  use  and  not  for  idle  amusement  will,  when 
he  sees  that  friction  persists  in  spite  of  his  brain, 
be  so  clearly  impressed  by  the  advisability  of  sep- 
aration as  the  sole  cure  that  he  will  steel  himself 
to  the  effort  necessary  for  a  separation.  One  of 
the  chief  advantages  of  an  efficient  brain  is  that 
an  efficient  brain  is  capable  of  acting  with  firm- 
ness and  resolution,  partly,  of  course,  because  it 
has  been  toned  up,  but  more  because  its  opera- 


io6  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

tions  are  not  confused  by  the  interference  of  mere 
instincts. 

Thirdly,  there  is  the  environment  of  one's  gen- 
eral purpose  in  life,  which  is,  I  feel  convinced, 
far  more  often  hopelessly  wrong  and  futile  than 
either  the  environment  of  situation  or  the  en- 
vironment of  individuals.  I  will  be  bold  enough 
to  say  that  quite  seventy  per  cent  of  ambition  is 
never  realised  at  all,  and  that  ninety-nine  per 
cent  of  all  realised  ambition  is  fruitless.  In  other 
words,  that  a  gigantic  sacrifice  of  the  present  to 
the  future  is  always  going  on.  And  here  again 
the  utility  of  brain-discipline  is  most  strikingly 
shown.  A  man  whose  first  business  it  is  every 
day  to  concentrate  his  mind  on  the  proper  per- 
formance of  that  particular  day,  must  necessarily 
conserve  his  interest  in  the  present.  It  is  im- 
possible that  his  perspective  should  become  so 
warped  that  he  will  devote,  say,  fifty-five  years 
of  his  career  to  problematical  preparations  for 
his  comfort  and  his  glory  during  the  final  ten 
years.  A  man  whose  brain  is  his  servant,  and 
not  his  lady-help  or  his  pet  dog,  will  be  in  receipt 
of  such  daily  content  and  satisfaction  that  he  will 
early  ask  himself  the  question :  "  As  for  this  am- 
bition that  is  eating  away  my  hours,  what  will  it 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  107 

give  me  that  I  have  not  already  got?  "  Further, 
the  steady  development  of  interest  in  the  hobby 
(call  it!)  of  common-sense  daily  living  will  act 
as  an  automatic  test  of  any  ambition.  If  an  am- 
bition survives  and  flourishes  on  the  top  of  that 
daily  cultivation  of  the  machine,  then  the  owner 
of  the  ambition  may  be  sure  that  it  is  a  genuine 
and  an  invincible  ambition,  and  he  may  pursue 
it  in  full  faith ;  his  developed  care  for  the  present 
will  prevent  him  from  making  his  ambition  an 
altar  on  which  the  whole  of  the  present  is  to  be 
offered  up. 

I  shall  be  told  that  I  want  to  do  away  with 
ambition,  and  that  ambition  is  the  great  motive- 
power  of  existence,  and  that  therefore  I  am  an 
enemy  of  society  and  the  truth  is  not  in  me.  But 
I  do  not  want  to  do  away  with  ambition.  What 
I  say  is  that  current  ambitions  usually  result  in 
disappointment,  that  they  usually  mean  the  com- 
plete distortion  of  a  life.  This  is  an  incontestable 
fact,  and  the  reason  of  it  is  that  ambitions  are 
chosen  either  without  knowledge  of  their  real 
value  or  without  knowledge  of  what  they  will 
cost.  A  disciplined  brain  will  at  once  show  the 
unnecessariness  of  most  ambitions,  and  will  en- 
sure that  the  remainder  shall  be  conducted  with 


io8  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

reason.  It  will  also  convince  its  possessor  that 
the  ambition  to  live  strictly  according  to  the 
highest  common  sense  during  the  next  twenty- 
four  hours  is  an  ambition  that  needs  a  lot  of 
beating. 


XV 
L.S.D. 

AYBODY  who  really  wishes  to  talk  simple 
truth  about  money  at  the  present  time  is 
confronted  by  a  very  serious  practical 
difficulty.  He  must  put  himself  in  opposition 
to  the  overwhelming  body  of  public  opinion,  and 
resign  himself  to  being  regarded  either  as  a 
poseur,  a  crank,  or  a  fool.  The  public  is  in 
search  of  happiness  now,  as  it  was  a  million 
years  ago.  Money  is  not  the  principal  factor  in 
happiness.  It  may  be  argued  whether,  as  a  fac- 
tor in  happiness,  money  is  of  twentieth-rate 
importance  or  fiftieth-rate  importance.  But  it 
cannot  be  argued  whether  money,  in  point  of  fact, 
does  or  does  not  of  itself  bring  happiness.  There 
can  be  no  doubt  whatever  that  money  does  not 
bring  happiness.  Yet,  in  face  of  this  incontro- 
vertible and  universal  truth,  the  whole  public 
behaves  exactly  as  if  money  were  the  sole  or  the 
principal  preliminary  to  happiness.  The  public 
does  not  reason,  and  it  will  not  listen  to  reason; 


no  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

its  blood  is  up  in  the  money-hunt,  and  the  phi- 
losopher might  as  well  expostulate  with  an  earth- 
quake as  try  to  take  that  public  by  the  button- 
hole and  explain.  If  a  man  sacrifices  his  interest 
under  the  will  of  some  dead  social  tyrant  in  order 
to  marry  whom  he  wishes,  if  an  English  minister 
of  religion  declines  twenty-five  thousand  dollars 
a  year  to  go  into  exile  and  preach  to  New  York 
millionaires,  the  phenomenon  is  genuinely  held 
to  be  so  astounding  that  it  at  once  flies  right 
round  the  world  in  the  form  of  exclamatory  news- 
paper articles !  In  an  age  when  such  an  attitude 
towards  money  is  sincere,  it  is  positively  danger- 
ous —  I  doubt  if  it  may  not  be  harmful  —  to  per- 
sist with  loud  obstinacy  that  money,  instead  of 
being  the  greatest,  is  the  least  thing  in  the  world. 
In  times  of  high  military  excitement  a  man  may 
be  ostracised  if  not  lynched  for  uttering  opinions 
which  everybody  will  accept  as  truisms  a  couple 
of  years  later,  and  thus  the  wise  philosopher 
holds  his  tongue  —  lest  it  should  be  cut  out.  So 
at  the  zenith  of  a  period  when  the  possession  of 
money  in  absurd  masses  is  an  infallible  means 
to  the  general  respect,  I  have  no  intention  either 
of  preaching  or  of  practising  quite  all  that  I  pri- 
vately believe  in  the  matter  of  riches. 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  in 

It  was  not  always  thus.  Though  there  have 
been  previous  ages  as  lustful  for  wealth  and  os- 
tentation as  our  own,  there  have  also  been  ages 
when  money-getting  and  millionaire-envying 
were  not  the  sole  preoccupations  of  the  average 
man.  And  such  an  age  will  undoubtedly  succeed 
to  ours.  Few  things  would  surprise  me  less,  in 
social  life,  than  the  upspringing  of  some  anti- 
luxury  movement,  the  formation  of  some  league 
or  guild  among  the  middling  classes  (where  alone 
intellect  is  to  be  found  in  quantity),  the  members 
of  which  would  bind  themselves  to  stand  aloof 
from  all  the  great,  silly,  banal,  ugly,  and  tedious 
fore -activities  of  the  time,  and  not  to  spend  more 
than  a  certain  sum  per  annum  on  eating,  drink- 
ing, covering  their  bodies,  and  being  moved  about 
like  parcels  from  one  spot  of  the  earth's  surface 
to  another.  Such  a  movement  would,  and  will, 
help  towards  the  formation  of  an  opinion  which 
would  condemn  lavish  expenditure  on  personal 
satisfactions  as  bad  form.  However,  the  share- 
holders of  grand  hotels,  restaurants,  and  race- 
courses of  all  sorts,  together  with  popular  singers 
and  barristers,  etc.,  need  feel  no  immediate  alarm. 
The  movement  is  not  yet. 

As  touching  the  effect  of  money  on  the  efficient 


H2  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

ordering  of  the  human  machine,  there  is  happily 
no  necessity  to  inform  those  who  have  begun  to 
interest  themselves  in  the  conduct  of  their  own 
brains  that  money  counts  for  very  little  in  that 
paramount  affair.  Nothing  that  really  helps 
towards  perfection  costs  more  than  is  within  the 
means  of  every  person  who  reads  these  pages. 
The  expenses  connected  with  daily  meditation, 
with  the  building-up  of  mental  habits,  with  the 
practice  of  self-control  and  of  cheerfulness,  with 
the  enthronement  of  reason  over  the  rabble  of 
primeval  instincts  —  these  expenses  are  really, 
you  know,  trifling.  And  whether  you  get  that 
well-deserved  rise  of  a  pound  a  week  or  whether 
you  don't,  you  may  anyhow  go  ahead  with  the 
machine ;  it  is  n't  a  motor-car,  though  I  started 
by  comparing  it  to  one.  And  even  when,  having 
to  a  certain  extent  mastered,  through  sensible 
management  of  the  machine,  the  art  of  achieving 
a  daily  content  and  dignity,  you  come  to  the 
embroidery  of  life  —  even  the  best  embroidery 
of  life  is  not  absolutely  ruinous.  Meat  may  go 
up  in  price  —  it  has  done  —  but  books  won't. 
Admission  to  picture  galleries  and  concerts  and 
so  forth  will  remain  quite  low.  The  views  from 
Richmond  Hill  or  Hindhead,  or  along  Pall  Mall 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  113 

at  sunset,  the  smell  of  the  earth,  the  taste  of  fruit 
and  of  kisses  —  these  things  are  unaffected  by 
the  machinations  of  trusts  and  the  hysteria  of 
stock  exchanges.  Travel,  which  after  books  is 
the  finest  of  all  embroideries  (and  which  is  not 
to  be  valued  by  the  mile  but  by  the  quality),  is 
decidedly  cheaper  than  ever  it  was.  All  that  is 
rt  quired  is  ingenuity  in  one's  expenditure.  And 
much  ingenuity  with  a  little  money  is  vastly  more 
profitable  and  amusing  than  much  money  with- 
out ingenuity. 

And  all  the  while  as  you  read  this  you  are  say- 
ing, with  your  impatient  sneer :  "  It 's  all  very 
well;  it's  all  very  fine  talking,  but  .  .  .  ."  In 
brief,  you  are  not  convinced.  You  cannot  de- 
racinate that  wide-rooted  dogma  within  your 
soul  that  more  money  means  more  joy.  I  regret 
it.  But  let  me  put  one  question,  and  let  me  ask 
you  to  answer  it  honestly.  Your  financial  means 
are  greater  now  than  they  used  to  be.  Are  you 
happier  or  less  discontented  than  you  used  to 
be?  Taking  your  existence  day  by  day,  hour  by 
hour,  judging  it  by  the  mysterious  feel  (in  the 
chest)  of  responsibilities,  worries,  positive  joys 
and  satisfactions,  are  you  genuinely  happier  than 
you  used  to  be? 


H4  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

I  do  not  wish  to  be  misunderstood.  The  finan- 
cial question  cannot  be  ignored.  If  it  is  true  that 
money  does  not  bring  happiness,  it  is  no  less 
true  that  the  lack  of  money  induces  a  state  of 
affairs  in  which  efficient  living  becomes  doubly 
difficult.  These  two  propositions,  superficially 
perhaps  self-contradictory,  are  not  really  so.  A 
modest  income  suffices  for  the  fullest  realisation 
of  the  Ego  in  terms  of  content  and  dignity;  but 
you  must  live  within  it.  You  cannot  righteously 
ignore  money.  A  man,  for  instance,  who  culti- 
vates himself  and  instructs  a  family  of  daughters 
in  everything  except  the  ability  to  earn  their  own 
livelihood,  and  then  has  the  impudence  to  die 
suddenly  without  leaving  a  penny  —  that  man  is 
a  scoundrel.  Ninety  —  or  should  I  say  ninety- 
nine  ?  —  per  cent  of  all  those  anxieties  which  ren- 
der proper  living  almost  impossible  are  caused 
by  the  habit  of  walking  on  the  edge  of  one's  in- 
come as  one  might  walk  on  the  edge  of  a  preci- 
pice. The  majority  of  Englishmen  have  some 
financial  worry  or  other  continually,  everlastingly 
at  the  back  of  their  minds.  The  sacrifice  neces- 
sary to  abolish  this  condition  of  things  is  more 
apparent  than  real.  All  spending  is  a  matter  of 
habit. 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  115 

Speaking  generally,  a  man  can  contrive,  out  of 
an  extremely  modest  income,  to  have  all  that  he 
needs  —  unless  he  needs  the  esteem  of  snobs. 
Habit  may,  and  habit  usually  does,  make  it  just 
as  difficult  to  keep  a  family  on  two  thousand  a 
year  as  on  two  hundred.  I  suppose  that  for  the 
majority  of  men  the  suspension  of  income  for  a 
single  month  would  mean  either  bankruptcy,  the 
usurer,  or  acute  inconvenience.  Impossible, 
under  such  circumstances,  to  be  in  full  and 
independent  possession  of  one's  immortal  soul! 
Hence  I  should  be  inclined  to  say  that  the  first 
preliminary  to  a  proper  control  of  the  machine  is 
the  habit  of  spending  decidedly  less  than  one 
earns  or  receives.  The  veriest  automaton  of  a 
clerk  ought  to  have  the  wherewithal  of  a  whole 
year  as  a  shield  against  the  caprices  of  his  em- 
ployer. It  would  be  as  reasonable  to  expect  the 
inhabitants  of  an  unfortified  city  in  the  midst  of 
a  plain  occupied  by  a  hostile  army  to  apply  them- 
selves successfully  to  the  study  of  logarithms  or 
metaphysics,  as  to  expect  a  man  without  a  year's 
income  in  his  safe  to  apply  himself  successfully 
to  the  true  art  of  living. 

And  the  whole  secret  of  relative  freedom  from 
financial  anxiety  lies  not  in  income,  but  in  ex- 


n6  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

penditure.  I  am  ashamed  to  utter  this  antique 
platitude.  But,  like  most  aphorisms  of  unassail- 
able wisdom,  it  is  completely  ignored.  You  say, 
of  course,  that  it  is  not  easy  to  leave  a  margin 
between  your  expenditure  and  your  present  in- 
come. I  know  it.  I  fraternally  shake  your  hand. 
Still,  it  is,  in  most  cases,  far  easier  to  lessen  one's 
expenditure  than  to  increase  one's  income  with- 
out increasing  one's  expenditure.  The  alterna- 
tive is  before  you.  However  you  decide,  be  as- 
sured that  the  foundation  of  philosophy  is  a 
margin,  and  that  the  margin  can  always  be  had. 


XVI 
REASON,    REASON! 

IN  conclusion,  I  must  insist  upon  several 
results  of  what  I  may  call  the  "  intensive 
culture  "  of  the  reason.  The  brain  will  not 
only  grow  more  effectively  powerful 'in  the  de- 
partments of  life  where  the  brain  is  supposed 
specially  to  work,  but  it  will  also  enlarge  the 
circle  of  its  activities.  It  will  assuredly  interfere 
in  everything.  The  student  of  himself  must  nec- 
essarily conduct  his  existence  more  and  more 
according  to  the  views  of  his  brain.  This  will 
be  most  salutary  and  agreeable  both  for  himself 
and  for  the  rest  of  the  world.  You  object.  You 
say  it  will  be  a  pity  when  mankind  refers  every- 
thing to  reason.  You  talk  about  the  heart.  You 
envisage  an  entirely  reasonable  existence  as  a 
harsh  and  callous  existence.  Not  so.  When  the 
reason  and  the  heart  come  into  conflict  the  heart 
is  invariably  wrong.  I  do  not  say  that  the  reason 
is  always  entirely  right,  but  I  do  say  that  it  is 
always  less  wrong  than  the  heart.  The  empire 


n8  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

of  the  reason  is  not  universal,  but  within  its 
empire  reason  is  supreme,  and  if  other  forces 
challenge  it  on  its  own  soil  they  must  take  the 
consequences.  Nearly  always,  when  the  heart 
opposes  the  brain,  the  heart  is  merely  a  pretty 
name  which  we  give  to  our  idleness  and  our 
egotism. 

We  pass  along  the  Strand  and  see  a  respectable 
young  widow  standing  in  the  gutter,  with  a  baby 
in  her  arms  and  a  couple  of  boxes  of  matches  in 
one  hand.  We  know  she  is  a  widow  because  of 
her  weeds,  and  we  know  she  is  respectable  by 
her  clothes.  We  know  she  is  not  begging  be- 
cause she  is  selling  matches.  The  sight  of  her  in 
the  gutter  pains  our  heart.  Our  heart  weeps  and 
gives  the  woman  a  penny  in  exchange  for  a  half- 
penny box  of  matches,  and  the  pain  of  our  heart 
is  thereby  assuaged.  Our  heart  has  performed  a 
good  action.  But  later  on  our  reason  (unfortu- 
nately asleep  at  the  moment)  wakes  up  and  says : 
"  That  baby  was  hired ;  the  weeds  and  matches 
merely  a  dodge.  The  whole  affair  was  a  spec- 
tacle got  up  to  extract  money  from  a  fool  like 
you.  It  is  as  mechanical  as  a  penny  in  the  slot. 
Instead  of  relieving  distress  you  have  simply 
helped  to  perpetuate  an  infamous  system.  You 


THE   HUMAN    MACHINE  ng 

ought  to  know  that  you  can't  do  good  in  that  off- 
hand way."  The  heart  gives  pennies  in  the 
street.  The  brain  runs  the  Charity  Organisation 
Society.  Of  course,  to  give  pennies  in  the  street 
is  much  less  trouble  than  to  run  the  C.O.S.  As 
a  method  of  producing  a  quick,  inexpensive,  and 
pleasing  effect  on  one's  egotism  the  C.O.S.  is 
simply  not  in  it  with  this  dodge  of  giving  pennies 
at  random,  without  inquiry.  Only  —  which  of 
the  two  devices  ought  to  be  accused  of  harshness 
and  callousness?  Which  of  them  is  truly  kind? 
I  bring  forward  the  respectable  young  widow  as 
a  sample  case  of  the  Heart  <o.  Brain  conflict.  All 
other  cases  are  the  same.  The  brain  is  always 
more  kind  than  the  heart;  the  brain  is  always 
more  willing  than  the  heart  to  put  itself  to  a 
great  deal  of  trouble  for  a  very  little  reward ;  the 
brain  always  does  the  difficult,  unselfish  thing, 
and  the  heart  always  does  the  facile,  showy 
thing.  Naturally  the  result  of  the  brain's  activity 
on  society  is  always  more  advantageous  than  the 
result  of  the  heart's  activity. 

Another  point.  I  have  tried  to  show  that,  if 
the  reason  is  put  in  command  of  the  feelings,  it 
is  impossible  to  assume  an  attitude  of  blame 
towards  any  person  whatsoever  for  any  act  what- 


120  THE    HUMAN    MACHINE 

soever.  The  habit  of  blaming  must  depart  abso- 
lutely. It  is  no  argument  against  this  statement 
that  it  involves  anarchy  and  the  demolition  of 
society.  Even  if  it  did  (which  emphatically  it 
does  not),  that  would  not  affect  its  truth.  All 
great  truths  have  been  assailed  on  the  ground 
that  to  accept  them  meant  the  end  of  everything. 
As  if  that  mattered!  As  I  make  no  claim  to  be 
the  discoverer  of  this  truth  I  have  no  hesitation 
in  announcing  it  to  be  one  of  the  most  important 
truths  that  the  world  has  yet  to  learn.  However, 
the  real  reason  why  many  people  object  to  this 
truth  is  not  because  they  think  it  involves  the 
utter  demolition  of  society  (fear  of  the  utter 
demolition  of  society  never  stopped  anyone  from 
doing  or  believing  anything,  and  never  will),  but 
because  they  say  to  themselves  that  if  they  can't 
blame  they  can't  praise.  And  they  do  so  like 
praising!  If  they  are  so  desperately  fond  of 
praising,  it  is  a  pity  that  they  don't  praise  a  little 
more!  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  average 
man  blames  much  more  than  he  praises.  His 
instinct  is  to  blame.  If  he  is  satisfied  he  says 
nothing;  if  he  is  not,  he  most  illogically  kicks 
up  a  row.  So  that  even  if  the  suppression  of 
blame  involved  the  suppression  of  praise  the 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  121 

change  would  certainly  be  a  change  for  the  better. 
But  I  can  perceive  no  reason  why  the  suppression 
of  blame  should  involve  the  suppression  of  praise. 
On  the  contrary,  I  think  that  the  habit  of  prais- 
ing should  be  fostered.  (I  do  not  suggest  the 
occasional  use  of  trowels,  but  the  regular  use  of 
salt-spoons.)  Anyhow,  the  triumph  of  the  brain 
over  the  natural  instincts  (in  an  ideally  organised 
man  the  brain  and  the  natural  instincts  will  never 
have  even  a  tiff)  always  means  the  ultimate  tri- 
umph of  kindness. 

And,  further,  the  culture  of  the  brain,  the  con- 
stant disciplinary  exercise  of  the  reasoning  fac- 
ulty, means  the  diminution  of  misdeeds.  (Do 
not  imagine  I  am  hinting  that  you  are  on  the 
verge  of  murdering  your  wife  or  breaking  into 
your  neighbour's  house.  Although  you  person- 
ally are  guiltless,  there  is  a  good  deal  of  sin  still 
committed  in  your  immediate  vicinity.)  Said 
Balzac  in  "  La  Cousine  Bette,"  "  A  crime  is  in  the 
first  instance  a  defect  of  reasoning  powers."  In 
the  appreciation  of  this  truth,  Marcus  Aurelius 
was,  as  usual,  a  bit  beforehand  with  Balzac.  M. 
Aurelius  said,  "  No  soul  wilfully  misses  truth." 
And  Epictetus  had  come  to  the  same  conclusion 
before  M.  Aurelius,  and  Plato  before  Epictetus. 


122  THE   HUMAN    MACHINE 

All  wrongdoing  is  done  in  the  sincere  belief  that  it 
is  the  best  thing  to  do.  Whatever  sin  a  man  does 
he  does  either  for  his  own  benefit  or  for  the  bene- 
fit of  society.  At  the  moment  of  doing  it  he  is 
convinced  that  it  is  the  only  thing  to  do.  He  is 
mistaken.  And  he  is  mistaken  because  his  brain 
has  been  unequal  to  the  task  of  reasoning  the 
matter  out.  Passion  (the  heart)  is  responsible 
for  all  crimes.  Indeed,  crime  is  simply  a  conven- 
ient monosyllable  which  we  apply  to  what  hap- 
pens when  the  brain  and  the  heart  come  into 
conflict  and  the  brain  is  defeated.  That  trans- 
action of  the  matches  was  a  crime,  you  know. 

Lastly,  the  culture  of  the  brain  must  result  in 
the  habit  of  originally  examining  all  the  phe- 
nomena of  life  and  conduct,  to  see  what  they 
really  are,  and  to  what  they  lead.  The  heart 
hates  progress,  because  the  dear  old  thing  always 
wants  to  do  as  has  always  been  done.  The  heart 
is  convinced  that  custom  is  a  virtue.  The  heart 
of  the  dirty  working  man  rebels  when  the  State 
insists  that  he  shall  be  clean,  for  no  other  reason 
than  that  it  is  his  custom  to  be  dirty.  Useless  to 
tell  his  heart  that,  clean,  he  will  live  longer !  He 
has  been  dirty  and  he  will  be.  The  brain  alone 
is  the  enemy  of  prejudice  and  precedent,  which 


THE    HUMAN    MACHINE  123 

alone  are  the  enemies  of  progress.  And  this 
habit  of  originally  examining  phenomena  is  per- 
haps the  greatest  factor  that  goes  to  the  making 
of  personal  dignity;  for  it  fosters  reliance  on 
one's  self  and  courage  to  accept  the  consequences 
of  the  act  of  reasoning.  Reason  is  the  basis  of 
personal  dignity. 

I  finish.  I  have  said  nothing  of  the  modifica- 
tions which  the  constant  use  of  the  brain  will 
bring  about  in  the  general  'values  of  existence. 
Modifications  slow  and  subtle,  but  tremendous! 
The  persevering  will  discover  them.  It  will  hap- 
pen to  the  persevering  that  their  whole  lives  are 
changed  —  texture  and  colour,  too !  Naught  will 
happen  to  those  who  do  not  persevere. 


r 

Tl 


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